(Content warning, I suppose.)
This is an essay about my dead boyfriend. It’s also about the Netflix series Stranger Things—a show that has come to mean more to me than I can really express.
Since Nick’s death, what was once just a series has become something of an emotional impediment. A handicap I can’t overcome because of the hurting I’ve linked to its existence. In short: the show represents a bizarre way for me to trace the story arc of my own trauma. It’s hard for me to piece together the ways in which Stranger Things has become intrinsically linked with my boyfriend’s murder, but bear with me while I try.
Nick was killed on October 31st, 2017. It was a Tuesday, Halloween, and he and I had made loose plans to attend a party that evening. I was at work in the early afternoon when an alert went out that there had been a terrorist attack in lower Manhattan. A truck driver had driven into the West Side Highway bike lane. I texted Nick—not to see if he was safe, but to let him know about the attack. Just in case he hadn’t seen the news yet. I didn’t think twice when he didn’t answer immediately. My office was devouring the news in real time as twitter broke out into a stream of on-the-ground updates. My panic level started rising palpably as Nick’s response time stretched. We reached 10-minute, 15-minute, 20-minute intervals.
I am, at my core, a calm person. I recognize that people can make this baseless declaration about themselves, but I really, really believe it to be true. I am not one to assume the worst. I store faith not in the unlikely, but in the probable statistical outcome. The odds of Nick being affected by a terrorist attack were negligible. Laughably implausible. And yet, he hadn’t answered. In pursuit of rational clarity, I called Nick’s mother Monica. She had been with Nick all day. The last I’d heard from Nick, he’d been leaving his mother’s office in lower Manhattan to go run errands.
So I called Monica.
She told me that Nick had been biking on the west side path in exactly the time frame of the terrorist incident. He had left her office to bike to Whole Foods on Greenwich Street. And she had not heard from him since.
There is no combination of words that can even marginally communicate the feeling that courses through your body when this type of news hits.
This type of news. As if there is a categorical organization for something so incomprehensibly life altering.
The night Nick was killed...I spent 7 hours looking for him.
I called every hospital in New York, asking, begging, crying for them to let me know if any unidentified 6 foot 3 blonde-haired, blue-eyed men had been checked in from the terror scene. I went from police precinct to precinct, blindly calling Ubers, asking for updated reports on who, and how many people had been killed. I pleaded with detectives, nurses, city officials… insisting that I needed information about my missing boyfriend’s whereabouts. I even stopped referring to Nick as my boyfriend at one point, convinced in my desperation that lying and calling as a “wife” seeking information about her “husband” might carry more gravity and yield better results.
The panic level reached a comically high threshold of chaos.
I was still wearing the party-store cat ears that I’d donned for work that day; people around me were quite literally partying in the streets. The city of New York was preparing itself for a night of glitter-eyed mischief, wholly unaware that one of its most loyal inhabitants lay dead on the west side highway.
In the midst of my frantic search, I called every person I knew. I waded in and out of consciousness and mental clarity, thinking with certainty that Nick would, on the next ring, surely answer my call.
To look at this in retrospect is uniquely cruel: Nick was dead the whole time.
The body count was rising hourly. 7PM. 8 PM, 9PM. 4 confirmed dead. 6 confirmed dead. No males. No young males. Two young males? No identities confirmed. No further information.
It’s all a bit hazy, but at one point in my harrowed man-hunt to find Nick, my best friend Corey picked me up in her car and together we continued our search for Nick, with his mother Monica also in tow. And we drove. We drove uptown, downtown, across town. Each of us with our own network of shared and disparate friends and family members who swore they were “on-hold-but-next-in-line” with the hospital, the police, whomever.
And on what felt like every single street corner, I saw the same thing. Season 2 Stranger Things posters. The show was, at the time, very relevant and top of mind. It was the 31st of 2017, and season 2 had just come out a few days prior. A pre-halloween premiere. I had already watched the first episode of the new season. Nick hadn’t yet, and I’d promised to re-watch with him. We were going to binge the whole second season together just as we’d done the year before for the first season.
The year before – eerily, also exactly on Halloween, we had started the 1st season together. That Halloween of 2016 (on what I refer to as Our Last Living Halloween to nobody but myself), Nick and I had spent the day in Manhattan, just walking around. We had seen so many strangers dressed up as Millie Bobby Brown’s character “Eleven,” carrying boxed Eggo waffles and accented with a single nostril of fake blood. We’d gone back to his apartment that night and decided to finally watch the first episode together, and we were hooked. We both devoured season 1, enamored by the thrilling terror of a show that actually lived up to its own hype. We were excited for the 2nd season—we’d watch it upon live-release this time. We couldn’t wait.
Back to the hell-scape of Halloween of 2017. My desperate pursuit for Nick led me to the entrance hall floor of Bellevue hospital. Our search party had met little success in contacting anyone at the hospitals, so we did the only thing we could think to do, which was to physically show up. It was probably close to 10 PM at that point. I’d been carted around the entirety of Manhattan in search of Nick, not daring to flirt with the idea that he could be gone. To think him “dead” was unfathomable—he was just misplaced.
As I was crumpled on the entryway floor of Bellevue Hospital, waiting for someone to tell me whether an unidentified 6’3 blonde, blue eyed male had yet been checked in, I received a text from a friend. “Just finished Stranger Things. You watch yet??”
It felt unearthly. Like the show was mocking me. All night, I had stared at the Season 2 Netflix ad posters up the avenues as we drove from police station to hospital and back again. And there it was, prodding. Had I watched yet. This friend of course had no idea that I was in the midst of an unthinkable personal crisis.
How crazy would it have been to have responded:
“Not yet - planning to watch with Nick. But he might be dead.”
I laugh about this now. Really.
My sister, in a loving attempt to calm me down in the midst of my losing Nick and frantically searching for him, texted me assuring that Nick was “probably fine,” and that the state of his mysterious absence was as if he was “in the upside down.”
The Upside Down is, for those who may not know, an alternate dimension in which the premise of Stranger Things is rooted. A parallel universe to the human world, “The Upside Down” is limbo. Simply: where people go and are lost. In the first episode of the series, The Vanishing of Will Byers, we watch a young kid dissipate into the abyss of The Upside Down. Set as a mirror to real, fictional 1980s Indiana in which the series takes place, Will Byers exists, alive but unreachable, in this nightmarish world of The Upside Down. The episodes unfold as we watch Will’s friends on their quest to retrieve him despite the fact that the world believes him to be dead.
Spoiler alert: they find him in the end.
That Nick’s absence could be explained so easily as this was fantastical, hopeful, and what it had to be.
I don’t need to divulge what the following hours looked like. I’m not actually sure I could recount them in full even if I tried.
I was sitting on the entry-way floor of Bellevue Hospital when we got the call.
The FBI people are very polite about these things. Telling us over the phone that they could only speak with us in person, they summoned us back to Nick’s mother’s apartment.
Alongside my best friend Corey and Nick’s mother Monica, I entered the apartment building where the FBI people were waiting. The FBI man was kind. He insisted that we sit down on the living room couch. He stayed standing upright. I sat between Corey and Monica, and the FBI man began to speak. “I’m sorry, but…”
I feel sad for the people that have to deliver the news. To have to stand there in the painful moments following, share a breath of disbelief and watch complete strangers tasked with comprehending that their lives are dramatically, horrifically altered.
I’d say that the ensuing night was the longest of my life, but it wasn’t. In truth, I don’t remember much of what happened next. I do know that I slept that night. It sounds miraculous, but in reality my body just gave up. I look back on this and honestly think it’s kind of sweet.
Nick has now been dead 4 years. Netflix is working on Stranger Things season 4. Maybe even 5. Season 3 came and went, and no, I haven’t seen it. I never watched season 2. For a long time, I felt sad that I hadn’t caught up, and even sadder that I still felt like I couldn’t. I mean, we had promised to watch it together, Nick and I. If Nick never gets to see what happens, why should I? This last feeling is complicated. The guilt factor. I’ve gotten over it a bit as the years have passed. I did, for instance, see the new Star Wars movies and manage to finish Game of Thrones on my own, and I rest fairly assured in my conviction that Nick would have hated the ending. But then again, who really knows? You can drive yourself crazy second guessing these types of conclusions for the dead, so I try not to.
With Stranger Things—I just can’t. Can’t watch the show, can’t get over it.
I trace the time-spent since Nick’s death in a lot of ways. In years, obviously, but also in Christmases, in pairs of pants acquired, in hairstyles.
Nick was killed at 23. I’m 27 now.
He’s been dead 3-seasons-of-Stranger-Things.
I think often about Nick’s death, naturally. About how unfair it is that Nick’s life ended the way it did, about the life he and I shared, and about the life he never gets to have. About the conditions of that Halloween night and the horrible succession of alerts and phone calls and deep breaths climaxing in the harrowing finality of his murder. About Stranger Things. About how it was just there. Every season 2 promo poster on every corner of every street, painstakingly nudging, perhaps taunting me. Stranger Things linked me to earth in some ethereal way the night that Nick was killed. A haunting reminder that this couldn’t be the end-all be-all because Nick and I had plans. I mean, we had a whole new season of a show to watch.
It has now been 4 years.
I know Nick is dead. I even saw his body the next day. Behind a glass screen at the New York City medical examiner’s office, on the morning of November 1st. He was cremated a few days later. At the funeral home in Brooklyn, I tapped the wooden case that housed his body, and sent him off. Into the abyss. A real upside down.
I’ll be the first to say that I am a different person now than I was the night Nick died. A lot of things are different. My hair, my clothes, my life. But I still haven’t watched Stranger Things. I still experience what I feel are little taunts. Things that feel relevant in the celestial sequence of Stranger-Things events. Like, I’ve seen various cast members in all kinds of places. Once, after Nick’s death, I sat 2 rows behind Natalia Dyer on a flight from New York to LA. And once, I saw Millie Bobby Brown on the street. I called out her first name, and she answered. I remember when this happened 2 years ago and I wished so badly that I could tell Nick.
Stranger Things won’t leave me alone. Perhaps I’ve overly dramatized this, but also perhaps I haven’t. I know it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t have to. I see the existence of the show as a tether to a parallel life. A life where Nick and I would watch the episodes, would have plans, would be alive together.
Some call it cosmic. I call it cruel.
I suppose there are always stranger things.