To Remember Dora...
Last week, I learned that my friend Dora committed suicide. I haven’t really been able to cry, but I managed to write little (shards).Dora liked to leave things places. She’d come over, leave a sock, her tweed hat, and once, a nip of Kahlua that sat in our fridge for weeks until she reclaimed it, with a snort and a grin. An intern laughs, “She always got locked out. Sometimes, I think she did it just to see people.” When Dora first got her ukelele, she strode in beaming, only to forget it by my hamper. I didn’t even bother calling her; she was back, three hours later, with a box of Annie’s Mac & Cheese.
Nights with Dora went like this: Dora, let’s do work, Joyce, I’m hungry. Her, singing with a mouthful of macaroni or rice and bacon. Me, trying not to get distracted from interethnic anti-racism readings by her renditions of Kelly Clarkson and Dusty Springfield. Or, we sat out strategic songs at parties: Sean Paul is not a cigarette break, slow Wu Tang is. She center-parted her hair when she came over to sing, side-parted it when she had arrived to dance.
I don’t remember meeting Dora. It seems like she was Dora one day, and once she was Dora, she’d always been Dora. She was Dora, try the french fries with mayo just once, Dora, get Sokchea back from the Monkey Bar safely, please, Dora & Zardon, Sugar Water It Up on our stoop, Dora cry to me in bed bra crooked hair matted, Dora you’ll be famous one day, Dora of the piano and guitar, the booty-shake like no other, the three-sentence, fifteen-second life debrief in front of the library on the middle of the day.
I might leave this unfinished; I’ll come across her shirt, that other sock, or the earring that fell in mid-break-it-down. I don’t think she left things everywhere because she knew they’d stay there. I think she just knew that they’d come back to her if it really mattered. She took risks like that.
- Joyce Choi Won Li