#14 - It Just Is
CW: Death
(and a pretty sad playlist… proceed with caution, or not at all)
You can listen to the playlist on Spotify or scroll to the end.
One of the most consistently present people in my life throughout much of my middle and high school years was a girl named Dania Nader. I’m still not really sure how or when Dania and I ended up becoming close friends, but we went from two people you wouldn’t really think had much in common to sharing pretty much everything.
All I know is that at some point in middle school, we were watching all these random early 2010s YouTube covers together. Around the same time, thanks to the influence of my Pakistani-British teachers and my revolution-induced politics, I started listening to Lowkey and other U.K. underground rappers (Akala, Mic Righteous, Logic, etc.) I don’t think people would assume Dania was ‘political’ at all, but she knew every Lowkey song I did, sometimes better than I did. (She loved Cradle of Civilization.) I still have the A4 sheet of lyrics to Alphabet Assassin she handwrote in a boring math class. We would walk around school rapping it together, challenging ourselves to get to a later letter, eventually giving in to laughter (and our own limitations).
And I knew every teenage prankster Dania followed on Vine, and I watched the very early Shawn Mendes covers in our ever-renaming school cafeteria, and she watched every Sherlock and Doctor Who episode I’d seen. From political rap to Vine influencers to BBC shows, the only common thread shared by our shared interests was that they were shared. That we watched and listened and laughed and read and sang them together.
In ninth grade, I joined my school’s robotics team. Dania and I spent so much time together that she often ended up in the robotics room, and decided to join the next year. Immediately, undoubtedly, she was the best of us; the most creative, efficient, consistent, hardworking. When it was time for the competition, I sat next to her as she took her first flight, ever, and landed outside Egypt for the first time in her life. On Dania’s first year on the team, we won our school’s first robotics awards in Doha, Qatar.
The next year, we flew to another robotics competition in Austria, and while we didn’t win, we walked out of a comic book store in Vienna with matching glow-in-the-dark David Tennant + TARDIS posters, which is pretty close, I think.
In those years, we spent countless hours in the robotics room, messing around with our little LEGO mishaps, taking them very seriously but having so much fun. We stayed after school nearly every day for several months of each year, worked during our lunch breaks, skipped some classes. And in those countless hours were what felt like just as many zipties used and misused, servos stopping right before they should, or right after, and inside jokes and stories and memories and absurdity.
Eventually I graduated and left for NYU Abu Dhabi, and Dania stayed and studied engineering and joined the robotics team at AUC. Without our shared contexts our lives took different paths, and we fell largely out of touch, but occassionally caught up over winter and summer breaks and jokes and references no one else would understand.
In December 2021, studying in New York for a Quantitative Analysis final exam I was hopelessly dreading, I opened Facebook to find a status update from Dania, who never really used Facebook. It was Dania’s mom instead, writing that her dear daughter passed away. You can guess what comes next, the shock and the tears and the confusion and the messages between mutual friends pleading for an explanation beyond “she passed away in her sleep”. My inability to comprehend econometrics immediately ceased to be relevant, or significant, compared to my inability to comprehend death.
I had, coincidentally, just listened to Mustafa’s When Smoke Rises a day or two before, an album largely dealing with grief and the death of a friend. I played it again, grateful it took me so long to get to it, but not any longer than necessary. Then, with the help of a Bright Eyes Facebook fan group, I made and repeatedly listened to a version of this playlist.
Though at times comforting and beautiful, this is a very sad playlist, and I hope you never need it. But when I did, these songs were there for me. These are songs about death, and grieving a loved one. Except I don’t know what the last song, Strawberry Lemonade, is about. But I know it ends with these lyrics:
There’s a consolation prize:
In the corner of my mind
I will always be your friend.
10 songs
(Spotify)
Blake’s View - M. Ward
It Just Is - Rilo Kiley
Strange Beauty - First Aid Kit
Real Death - Mount Eerie
Ladder Song - Bright Eyes
Separate - Mustafa
Death with Dignity - Sufjan Stevens
Easy/Lucky/Free - Dawes (BE cover)
Jamie - Kevin Morby
Strawberry Lemonade - Christian Lee Hutson
I’ve been thinking a lot about Dania in the past months, and in the past weeks, and I find myself wanting to tell her stories no one else would be as excited by, or share jokes no one else would laugh over. But I ultimately look back at our memories with so much love and gratitude. I started writing this last week, after Taha, a recent alumni from my high school, as well as my teacher’s son and younger brother’s classmate, passed away suddenly, shocking our community, much like last December. If you see these words, I hope you’ll dedicate a prayer to Dania and Taha and their loved ones.
الله يرحمهم