Remembering an old friend.
By Sagar Castleman
Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner
The summer after my senior year of high school, a group of friends and I went to the beach for a few days. One evening, I joined Jonathan Nalikka, SEAS ’26, on the deck, where he heated up the grill and started flipping burgers. I don’t remember what we talked about, and I barely remember the scene—I think the sun was setting, but maybe it was cloudy. We probably heard the ocean. There was a vague excitement in the air for what the night might bring; later we would probably take shots that tasted like hand sanitizer and swim under a red moon. But what I remember clearly from that dusky moment on the deck was the two of us laughing really, really hard, and Jonathan saying, “We’re gonna have so much fun next year.”
It’s strange the way memory works: You and an old friend will talk about something you did together many years ago and find you remember it completely differently. Talking with high school friends about Jonathan during those first dumbfounded hours after receiving Dean Chang’s email, everyone had different stories. But they all spoke to the same qualities in him that had always been there, but which I strangely felt I could only verbalize after he was gone: his constant cheerfulness, his startling intelligence, his seeming inability to say anything unkind.
Most of my concrete memories with Jonathan, like with most people, are gone. What is left is an odd, brightly-colored montage: him leaning over my desk in high school STEM classes explaining problems to me, a pencil behind his ear and a finger on the worksheet; him doing the dishes after a dinner party wearing long yellow gloves and cracking jokes; eating lunch with him on some lawn on move-in day freshman year, basking in relief that I already had a friend here. In ninth grade English, we were told to write a poem in class. Most of us wrote free-verse monstrosities—Jonathan read aloud a perfect sonnet about original sin.
A month ago I would have accepted, maybe a little sadly, that these final few recollections would also fade. But now they were imbued with a new importance. The knowledge that, along with some photos and texts, they were all I could ever have of Jonathan made me want to replay them in my head, tell them to other people, write them down—anything that would help me hold on to them.
Since that Sunday, that clichéd “I could have done something” feeling has hit me harder than I thought possible. Why did I let our friendship flicker out? Why did I only have one brief conversation with him this semester? Whether these questions were logical was beside the point; they were feelings that overwhelmed me, saddened me, and made me feel a strange new sense of doom. I didn’t know what to make of these feelings, or of talking and writing about myself when, speaking honestly, it had been years since I had had any role in his life. And even then, I had hardly ever been more than a minor character. I asked myself again and again, why, if I was so sad about his absence, had I not reached out to him for two years?
But in the end, of course, this story isn’t about me. If you knew Jonathan, then you know all this: you know his deep laugh, his faux-strut, his jokes that were sarcastic but never harsh, his endless willingness to help others. It’s easy to feel like there’s some larger injustice going on, that someone must have done something wrong for us to be here—maybe Columbia, but maybe some of us. I don’t want to hear another person tell me that there was nothing I could have done. What I wish is that just once, during one of the dozens of conversations Jonathan and I had over the last seven years, I had said something that would have told him how much he meant to all of us, how much we were rooting for him even if we didn’t always get the chance to say it, how much we would have helped him if we had only known he needed it, and how hopeless we would all feel without him, when small despondent groups of us came together to talk about everything he had been and done and everything he would have gone on to do. His senior superlative was “most likely to win the Nobel Prize.” I like to imagine the parallel universe where he’s won it and we’re reading about it in the news and we’re all so, so proud, but not even a little bit surprised.
Rest in peace, Jonathan.