My friend Solinea is dead

Don’t worry if you forget. I'll remind you.

My friend Solinea is dead.

This isn’t news. She’s been dead for almost two years now. Chances are good this isn’t consequential news for you, and that’s okay.

Lots of people are dead.

Solinea is just one of them.

I met Solinea in the nineties, when we were both working at Old Tucson Studios. She was a can-can dancer. I was a temp and a tech, setting up the pyrotechnic effects for Nightfall, the annual Halloween spectacular they put on there every year.

I have lots of stories about those days. Like the time I almost killed a dancer when I accidentally set off a cannon mortar filled with black powder at the wrong moment during a live show. The dancer was fine. I was a wreck.

Then there was the time one of the mortars caught on fire on a balcony during a different live show. The shows were pre-taped and actors lip-synced the action along with recordings. I popped out onto the balcony, hit the errant flame with a very modern fire extinguisher, and received a round of applause from the audience while the upstaged cowboys pretended to shoot each other in the street.

And then there was the time that I snuck into the Mission with a fellow tech to have a smoke break. We were happily chatting and puffing away when the chief pyrotechnician came running in, yelling at us to get the fuck out. Turns out that he’d stuck a wheelbarrow full of cans of black powder in the pew right behind where we were lighting up.

We could have died.

We didn’t.

But Solinea?

Solinea is dead.

Solinea and I were friends. Not for any real reason. We didn’t have a lot in common aside from being in the same space at the same time, but sometimes, especially when you are young, that’s enough. I only worked at Old Tucson Studios for about six weeks, but we remained friends for years. I went to her wedding. She and I had our first babies about a month apart. She was blonde and beautiful and graceful and a little bit younger than me. I was short and thick and funny and a little bit older than her.

We were friends.

And now she is dead.

This is my friend Solinea. Girl was a fucking knockout, amirite?

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Solinea would abso-fucking-lutely want me to interrupt this discussion of her being dead with a mention of the 10-month novel (or other long-form fiction) writing challenged I’m running this fall. Check it out.

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In 1995—before the marriages and the babies and the cancer that would take her life—Solinea was going back to her hometown in Northern Arizona for a weekend. I remember very little about that weekend except riding shotgun in her little red two-door, gabbing about nothing as we listened to a Collective Soul CD on endless rotation. For the rest of my life, even as Solinea and I grew up and lost touch, I would always think of her whenever I heard any of those songs.

Eventually, Solinea and I became Facebook friends, which is less about the platform itself than the particular brand of friendship it creates.

People you’ve known in your youth used to stay young forever. They never got old or ill or Trumpy. You never found out about their tragedies or achievements or daily thoughts. You would think of them fondly every now and again, wonder how they were now, and then get distracted and forget about them for another decade or so.

Not anymore. Now you get to be Facebook friends.

Cancer has been chasing its way through my Facebook friends for a while now, playing its morbid little game of Duck Duck Goose. Most of those goosed eventually got better. When the little fucker goosed Solinea, I was pissed off for her, but I thought she’d be okay in the end. I read her posts, hoped for the best, dropped encouraging comments every now and again. We went on this way for a few years.

Then it became clear that she was definitely going to die, and soon. I left a comment for her that I intended to be comforting, trying to say that she wasn’t alone. But of course, she was. We are always alone in pain or fear, but especially in death.

So stupid.

And for almost two years now, every time I think of Solinea, I think of me being thoughtless in her comments, and wishing I had done better, or at least never said anything at all.

And that was where things have stood for me and my dead friend Solinea ever since.

Until last Tuesday.

I was driving out to Trader Joe’s last Tuesday, and I was hit, for some reason, with a thought about Solinea, along with the inevitable cringe about the last thing I’d said to her.

The thing about driving to a grocery store is that it is such an automatic thing. You’re just driving and thinking. I decided to use my random thinks in that moment to throw a message out there into the void for Solinea.

Who, let’s not forget, is dead.

I am so sorry, babe, I thought. I know it doesn’t matter, but I wish I’d done better for you. How about you send me a sign if I’m forgiven?

In the interest of clarity, I generally don’t believe in ghost shit. I think it’s nonsense, with the exception of the one dream you get when someone really close to you dies. I’ve had many dreams about loved ones who have passed, but there’s always one where I’m like, “Oh, that was actually them.” Aside from those dreams, I do not believe there is real communication. Mediums are con artists; the Ouija board is a slumber party game. Maybe there’s a world after this one, I kinda think there is, but I don’t believe that anyone there is interested in vaguely answer inane questions about fourth grade crushes one letter at a time.

Dead is dead and Solinea is dead.

But I was driving and thinking. Apparently, some of what I was thinking is that dead people are not also busy, so I gave my dead friend Solinea a task. If she forgave me, then she could send something random, like a bluebird, my way.

Then I thought about something else and completely forgot all about Solinea, her state of being dead, and the to-do I’d just assigned to her, as though she had nothing better to do in her one wild and precious death than track down a fucking bluebird in Colorado and send it my way.

Apparently, even death cannot release you from the unremitting plague that is errands.

My local TJ’s has a plant display out front that I always stop to admire even though I never buy any plants, and as I was enjoying the display before heading inside to fetch my mandarin orange chicken and cosmic crisp apples, I became aware of the music playing. It was very faint, and I had an audiobook pumping into my ears. I took my earphones out, stepped further into the store, and listened.

“Son of a bitch,” I said in wonder, as the last few notes of the song played.

It was “The World I Know,” from the Collective Soul album that Solinea and I had listened to on our weekend trip. I’d said, “Send me a random thing,” and she was like, “No, babe. We can do better than that.”

My friend Solinea is dead.

She says hi.