nicole

the only time i've ever gone clubbing & the aftermath

About two months into dating Daniel, his brother’s friends invited us to go to Public Works and watch their pals DJ for the night. At the time, I was 22 years old—a baby who turned legal during the pandemic, and had never owned a fake ID. I’d never been to the club before. But I was a party girl through and through (notoriously being the body double alcoholic for the newbies in the house when they wanted to play a drinking game without getting too wasted their first time). Of course, I agreed.

The night was so remarkable I hardly remember it. I woke up the next morning with seven new Instagram followers that Daniel said were friends I made on the dance floor. When one of our group bought everyone a round of kamikaze shots, I forced everyone to cheers: “TO NEW FRIENDS!”

The next day, I messaged none of them. The next month, I messaged none of them. But over the course of the next few months, I started remembering one girl in a fluffy white fur coat who I chatted with at the beer garden before we went dancing. She was funny, and cool, and I don’t remember who she was with or what we talked about—just a moment later bathed in the blue light of a corner by the bathroom laughing and saying nothing. And one day she posted a poem. The last line was: “—” and it struck me. Then she started posting references to other media I consumed. And then, two years later, I had a dream that we met again in another club. I finally messaged her.

Nicole and I became pen pals across the coast of California. Unbeknownst to me, in the time since she and I had met in November, she’d quit her job to go home and learn how to live a writer’s life away from the corporate world. We wrote to each other about our days, about who we loved, about what we were like. After all, we’d only met each other once.

Our friendship blossomed during brat summer. I started calling her when I would have a moment of quiet cooking, or when I was walking to the grocery store unaccompanied. We’d hoped to see Charli XCX together, but we were too late to hatch a scheme—until I saw an ad for Axe Ceremonia in Mexico City. Nicole had been working on the outline of a novel about festival culture—something that I had never experienced. What if we went? And what if we went together?

Daniel and I booked our tickets. Nicole booked her tickets. I gave Nicole a list of a few places I wanted to see while in Mexico City, and she built an itinerary. The plans were materializing—had materialized, were becoming sentient on their own.

And then, two months before the trip, my grandmother passed away. It’s a loss I’ve written about lots, and it’s a loss that still remains so present in my life that I don’t expect word of it to slow. My grandmother was one of the most important people in shaping my character. I learned kindness from her. I learned about how to show love, about how to receive other people’s hurt and to endure it with them while they figured it out. I learned about how I should have been treated all my childhood—the way that she always would. Losing her wasn’t a surprise. She’d been diagnosed with severe heart failure a few months ago, and I’d visited her in the hospital, tried to reason with her through various episodes of dementia. I’d seen her worst fears, when horror was all that her chemistry would allow, and was shocked to find them mirroring my own. And then a few days later—back to normal, as though nothing happened. She was texting me on WhatsApp again. She was going to church. She earned herself a few more months of normalcy.

The holidays are a fraught time for my family. We lost my grandfather around Christmas. All of my hospitalizations have happened in the winter. My aunt’s passing, too. My father can’t bring himself to decorate like he used to. He worries it’ll curse us, like we’re jinxing our luck with a Christmas tree. But last year, I knew that this Christmas would likely be my grandmother’s last. She loved Christmas. Every year, when she was able, she would mail over 70 handwritten Christmas cards to all her friends, referencing a list of how much cash each friend had sent her previously, to make sure she never gifted them less than she got. Daniel and I were alone with her one weekend, and we put up the Christmas tree before my parents got home. She kept coming in and saying, “Oh, you’re making such a mess!” or “Go to bed, it’s so late!” only for us to hear from my sister that she would often talk about how we put it up miraculously in the weeks to follow. “I took a nap, and when I came out—it was done!”

Chinese New Year wraps up the holiday season for my family, and it was only right that she passed a little after the lantern festival. Nicole and I talked on the phone about what it was like losing her. I’d grown up with my grandparents and had lived with them for my whole life. She drove me to every piano lesson, every gymnastics class. And when my parents would yell at me or critique me, she would be keep the door of her room open so I could hide for a little. We had a special relationship, especially in her final years. She texted me every day, sending me little pictures and quotes her friends would forward her.

It was only a few weeks later that Nicole’s grandmother, her Zoya, would pass as well. They, too, had a special bond. I texted her that her grandmother had passed during eclipse season, as if to repopulate the moon, just as mine had gone to finish the lunar cycle. I was certain they were both up there, telling all their friends in the sky about their granddaughters.

But Daniel and I had talked about how our trip to Mexico City was all of a sudden less exciting. How could we be going to celebrate in such a time of grief? How, when the axis of our entire world had shifted, could we feel a realm we’d now forgotten? For weeks, I’d been napping on the couch with my headphones in, and that quiet time had been the highlight of every day. The hours of rest, when I couldn’t feel the howling cave that had been growing where my Adam’s apple should have been. I’d loved unconsciousness, the way I would often dream about my grandmother, how I could see her again and again in my sleep. Traveling meant, for once, being awake. Trying to create memories, but memories without her.

When we landed in Mexico City, Daniel and I rushed to meet Nicole at our first dinner reservation. And surprisingly, I wasn’t nervous. When we hugged, I laughed about how this is the second time we’ve ever met. But when we talked, the three of us had the rhythm of familiarity metronomed into our conversations. A jab here, a chuckle there, a great insult to society. The silence of a good meal. Silly photos with our mouths half full. We walked to Nicole’s hotel and hung around Parque Mexico until our eyes couldn’t hold themselves awake any longer.

I’d never been to a festival, but Nicole informed me that it was full of ups and downs. Travel, too, was full of ups and downs (Nicole and Daniel got food poisoning). Some plans were adjusted, others cancelled, and many enjoyed. We walked around museums, slid on slick castle floors holding hands, took notes at an architecture professor’s tour of his family home. It was like we’d grown into each other’s hands, Nicole’s holding mine, mine holding Daniel’s, full and even.

I would have loved for Nicole to live next door to me. I could imagine us lying supine on the bed with books over our noses or laptops on our chest, silently typing if only to read each other the lines we deem bangers. There was so much I admired about how her writing displayed interiority in the midst of action. There was so much we could learn from each other—my institutional knowledge, her true-born instinct. How tragic, to live so far and to meet even farther.

When the festival came around, Daniel’s brother Justin joined us too. The four of us met before the festival, and with now all three of them battling food poisoning, we tried to eat as much as our stomachs could handle. And then I bit into raw chicken in my torta. I hadn’t even ordered chicken.

We got to the festival, and in a two-hour tale turned into a simple short story, the festival workers kept messing up (charging me 10x more than the cost, cutting off my wristband and giving me the wrong one) and then promptly ignoring me, hoping I’d go away the more they messed up. We missed a whole set, and I almost got in a fist fight (yes, I know, if you’ve ever met me, the thought of this is rapturously funny). Afterwards, once we’d escalated the problem no fewer then six times, and I at last had my right wristband and a refund—I was laughing so hard I could cry, hugging Justin and Nicole and saying, “I hope you don’t hate me now.” The most surprising thing—Nicole laughed right back, yelling over the noise, “I love you more, actually!”

The rest of the night was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Daniel’s favorite band, The Parcels, had the entire crowd chanting an old soccer song, replacing the team name with PAR-CELS, PAR-CELS! None of us had seen them live before, and we wanted to record the whole thing, to put it into our pockets, carry it with us every day, this feeling of watching five Australian men live their dream of making sound an experience beyond comprehension, the ups and downs, the festival highs, the travel made worth it. The few videos we took are hilarious—we got splashed by beer, we are all screaming so loudly, Daniel yelling every lyric. We walked, danced to AG Cook (everyone pointed at me when the song “Mean Girls” came on), and got flautas in a cup. Then the main event—Charli XCX. Even though I’d seen her only a few months ago, the Mexico City crowd was electric in a way I’d never experienced. Everyone was dancing (but no shoving?), and Nicole and I were creating entire songs of choreography. Daniel took many cinematic videos panning between the two of us screaming along to every autotuned word.

When we woke up the next morning, Nicole was already at another seafood restaurant, despite her recent recovery from food poisoning. Daniel and I woke up at 11, and Justin texted a headline into our group chat: “Axe Ceremonia Festival cancelled after 2 dead in crane crash.”

At 7pm, while I was fighting with the Digibank stand at the festival, a decorative crane that had been placed after the last safety inspection had been blown over by a sudden gust of wind and killed two photographers, Bernice Giles & Miguel Hernández. According to the article, the crowd had been “evacuated out at 1:32am.” Coincidentally, this was also the time the crowd had been dissipating before the final event. We saw a few police officers by the entrance, but figured they were there for regular crowd control. There was no evidence that there had been a tragedy in the vicinity.

At 7pm, I knew from my own experience that the festival was being badly mismanaged. I didn’t expect someone at the other end of the park to be experiencing that mismanagement to its fatal extreme. It was bizarre—I couldn’t believe I’d been at the same festival that was in the headlines. While I was singing and dancing, pulling my arms around the four of us and jumping up and down like we were children, two people were being rushed off in ambulances whose sirens I’d never heard.

In the bathroom that Sunday night, Daniel asked me how I’d felt about the year. I didn’t think about it at all before I said, “Well my grandma died, so it’s kinda been the worst year ever.” I paused for a second, not having expected that to come out so forcefully. Our vacation in Mexico City had been a dream come true. It was just hot enough to forget about the Bay Area winter. We spent time completely unplugged from all responsibility. I brought just the right amount of film. And yet, I couldn’t divorce the vivacity of life without all the tragedy around it.

I think about this in a political sphere too, and I talk about it a lot on this little email blog I run. While Gaza is being bombed, I am cooking a meal for my neighbor Eric. While protestors are being detained, I am going to work and making social media posts and email newsletters for a living. And I do the things I can to make marginal differences. I won’t be posting any photos or videos of the festival like a joyous recap. I’m boycotting everything BDS has organized. I’m printing PACBI zines and giving them out at readings. And I’m doing some more things that I don’t particularly want to broadcast, because I’m not living my life exclusively to be perceived. I’m living my life to remind myself of vitality, and to bring signs of that vitality to the people who matter to me. And sometimes those people are strangers on the internet, and sometimes those people are the people I’ll text little “hello how r u” messages.

Every time I travel, I like to get souvenirs. Definitely for my family, some for friends, some for myself. Nicole said she didn’t usually get souvenirs for people—and then mentioned how I sent her earrings for her birthday, and how that was sweet. Nicole then decided to get souvenirs for her family, too (my favorite was a figurine for her grandpa—a clay man with a big head, because “he likes to say he’s the smartest person in the world”). Nicole and I got matching glass chili pepper earrings as souvenirs for each other. When we wear them, we’ll think of Mexico City. We’ll think of how in a world full of tragedy and death and food poisoning and raw chicken and dancing and flautas we once had a week in the heat of a metropolis we’d never known, and made ourselves familiar with so much.

I don’t drink anymore, but my equivalent of a drunk text is my waking-up 5am texts that I don’t remember when I get out of bed at 9am. I texted Nicole this morning and said, “I couldn’t help thinking about my grandma.” How I won’t get to tell her about this. How every time I saw a fun snack in Mexico City, I wanted to buy it for her to try, too. How Nicole probably felt the same way. The very same thing.

We talked about how strange it is to experience joy after loss. Or during loss. Or to lose during joyful times. Or how our lives aligned so parallel after one night meeting in a club on a hazy November night that you’ll hardly remember. How the both of us will be toying with life and death together, playthings on the hot concrete of a city born again and again each sunrise, new feet beating dirt into the same sidewalk cracks.