Siena Oristaglio and Noah Blumenston-Cook (@noahbc)
as printed in the boston phoenix:
There has never and will never be a girl like this girl.
Becca Darling, Becca Rosenthal, or Slug, as I knew her, was my best friend.
The worst phone call of my adult life, or of any life, ever, is the phone call I received on Tuesday at noon from Noah Blumenson-Cook. Noah is the man that Becca’s father called when he found his twenty-seven year old daughter lifeless in her bed on Tuesday morning.
I had been corresponding online with Becca until late at night on Monday. There had been a leak in the plumbing of her house and she had to come home (to her parents’ home, where she lived) to make sure that everything was okay.
I asked her if everything was okay.
“But,” she wrote, “It’s kind of boring. A guy’s coming to fix the leak tomorrow. I wish that the leak had been coming from an ancient Victorian attic room for a child that never existed that none of us ever knew was there.”
“It’s okay,” I wrote. “We’ll make sure to have that room in our house someday.”
Becca was the unseen influence behind art. When she loved art, she didn’t just appreciate it, she became a part of it. She showed up and wouldn’t leave until her idols were her best friends. Her art was connecting the dots. She dove into the internet and surfaced holding pearls of music that only a dozen people even knew about. She found Florence and the Machine, she found Regina Spektor (and befriended her instantly), she found Marina and the Diamonds, she found Basia Bulat and Lykke Li. She could spend two hours with a computer and give you a list of ten bands. Two years later, you would hear five of them on the radio, and the other five would be opening for them on tour. She was the factory girl for the entire world.
When she spoke with you, you had her undivided attention, and she demanded yours. This was easy to give to her, because you were already in love with her. You would make a secret language together that was part Parisian slang, part quotes from Parker Posey movies and part Jenny Holzer truisms. You would start saying the same thing at the same time. You would be perfectly in sync. You would have breakfast with her and she would invite someone else and all three of you instantly shared that language. You now had another person you will call your friend for the rest of your life.
She lived as a pastiche of everything and everyone she loved. She would tell your own quips and sayings back to you and you didn’t realize they were yours until she had already taken ownership of them. They fit better on her anyway. She had unseen darkness that she would only ever give you glimpses of. You tried to fix this sometimes, to give back what she gave you but she would never, ever let you. She loved you so much that you felt it all around you, every day — when you heard a song on the radio or saw a pink crinoline dress or someone started telling you about this amazing band they just found that you’d already known about for months because of her.
On Saturday, we buried Becca, but Becca will never die. Her love will stay in the world forever. Most people won’t ever know it’s there, but if you ask, anyone who knew her can show you.
On Saturday, her closest friends wearing cheap-ass light-up viking hats held a viking funeral on the Charles River. We wrote a secret or a lie on a small slip of paper and dropped these secrets and lies in an empty shoebox (for the fabulous gold-tipped shoes that I bought to wear to the funeral). We doused the box in gasoline, we set it light and set it free.
Please write a secret or a lie for Becca during this storm, and set it free. One of the most moving e-mails I’ve received in the astronomical outpouring of love that’s followed her death is from friend, who wrote, saying “I love you. Because the world is preparing to float away? No. because I do.”
So, as the world prepares to float away:
And Becca, Darling, (slug moosh beecharmer tallulah shiny sherpa shekel boopie et. ALL.), know, forever, that we are all going down together.
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