maria black

I got to know Maria in a beginning Japanese class. Her accent was pretty terrible and she didn’t continue after that semester, but we got to be friends. I liked her matter-of-fact way of talking, and her dry sense of humor, and her hair that looked like it belonged to a baby angel rather than the sort of person who owned a motorcycle jacket and occasionally smoked clove cigarettes. We had all those conversations you have in college, philosophizing and talking about sex and giving our ex-crushes silly nicknames. Once we spent a very long time recreating the particular font and style of the signs the college used to cancel classes, and showed up to our seminar early with scotch tape but we couldn’t bring ourselves to actually do it because we loved that professor so much. We ended up inviting him to a belated Thanksgiving dinner later on — we’d heard he was sick over the holidays. I think that was the first time I ever hosted a dinner party, at the house we shared with two other students.

Maria and I were good at being roommates; we fit together and didn’t get on each other’s nerves, even when we traveled together, even when we accidentally made a hotel reservation in Kyoto for a room with only one bed! One year we went to Las Vegas at New Year’s to see Cher on her endless farewell tour and Maria insisted we had to eat sauerkraut on New Year’s Day for good luck. We found a tiny weird German restaurant and liked it so much that we made it a tradition to find a German restaurant on every trip we took. It’s not often you find a friend who understands why this sort of thing is important. The sort of friend who would mail you a bunch of random postcards, one a day for a week, with just one word on each one. And also the sort of friend who would sit with you in the middle of the Ellis Island museum and cry with you when you got an unexpected phone call saying your grandma had died.

The last time I saw Maria we talked about how we didn’t see each other that often, but it made us happy to know that we both were here in the world. Without her in it, the world just isn’t quite as good.