I wake up on a Sunday and my friend is gone. Cancer. I had known, but it was sudden. Memories of her come in a rush, accompanied by old photos re-shared, emails lingering deep in the inbox, a handwritten note. Her absence — the knowledge that I'd never get any more of her stream-of-consciousness texts about sunsets on the Keio Line, or see that beaming smile when I dropped some new tracks on her — was suffocating, that moment where a life stops being something evolving and intoxicating and turns into the fixed fragments of memory.