This Shame Is Not Mine

Learning that the belief that you deserve to be in pain is a bunch of bullsh*t.

On a February day in 2005, I was working my restaurant job in New York City on an insultingly sunny morning, two weeks after my friend and creative partner Nicole Dufresne had been shot and killed on the Lower East Side. How dare the fucking sun shine, I thought. How dare anyone order coffee and eggs? I was shuffling around waiting tables while my coworkers stared. Whenever I’d catch one of them looking at me, they’d shift their eyes away, making an unconscious little grimace. At the staff meal, one of them had asked me what Nicole had said to make the kid who’d shot her in the chest shoot her. I just heard a faraway ringing as someone else said, “Leave her alone, man.” It was so fucking weird.

It is hard to come up with words for how fucked up things felt, and have felt ever since then. I touched on Nicole’s death in an essay I wrote last week, about how I’m beginning to see how many of the decisions I’ve made since she died have been tethered in one way or another to that night when her fiancé and my boyfriend and I dumbly, numbly sat in a police station, trying to grasp that what had happened was real. It still doesn’t feel real all these years later. I haven’t written much about it, or her, up until now, but I’m starting to try.