Just then her phone started to buzz on her bedside table. She leaned over and looked at it. “It’s my mom. Should I take it?” Without waiting for an answer she grabbed the phone and walked out of the room. I turned up the volume on her Mac with five chirps and realized she was playing Frank Ocean’s new album. Somehow, melancholic queer R&B felt like the appropriate soundtrack to the slow car crash of American democracy. I heard the rumble of a plane passing overhead on its way to Heathrow and the murmur of Ana’s voice in the next room. Yes. We were still good friends.

I texted Osama for a bit, but after half an hour or so the combination of CNN and the Sassy Saffron fumes had the effect of inducing both a headache and a profound state of drowsiness. The next thing I knew, Ana was standing in the doorway crying. Sobbing, even. Her shoulders shook with the effort of it. I had never seen her cry in real life before; as in, not onstage. If she cried, she did it in private and certainly never over the things that made me cry, like songs, boys, and cell phone bills. Her mom had called to tell her that Nana Ana had finally passed.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I know she was fucking old, but still.” She looked skyward and ran her two index fingers along the bottom of her eyes before her face crinkled again. I held out my arms. She crossed the room and folded herself into me. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and pulled away a long strand of snot. “Sorry,” she chuckled, wiping it on her jeans. “Gross.”

We sat there for a moment before turning back to the laptop. “I can’t fucking believe this,” she moaned, watching Trump take to the stage in New York City. As I stared at the red, white, and blue balloons falling, my mind drifted through the sun-baked mountains where I imagined Nana Ana roaming with her husband along the narrow switchbacks, past the faucet in the rock face, the miraculous aquifer that had restored his sight, past the raging river with its white cataracts that plunged along with my dog-eared copy of Kristeva’s book into the yawning mouth of hell, where perhaps we will all disappear like those hapless cavers one day. Where subjects become objects. Where truth becomes myth.

I lay back with Ana and she nestled her head into my shoulder. She closed her eyes, and I studied the peeling paint on the ceiling as her laptop cycled through the dark recesses of her iTunes playlist — Eiffel 65, Shaggy, sound effects from plays. We lay like that until I thought she had fallen asleep. And then, just before I drifted off, she whispered, “She was right.”

I took a deep breath in, rising back towards consciousness, and mumbled, “What?”