I was a senior in college when Biggie died. It was a Sunday. We spent the rest of the night in Steve and El B’s suite in East Campus like we did six months before, the night Pac was murdered. We listened to Big for hours. We talked about hip hop. We talked about guns. We talked about Suge. We talked about innocence. We talked and talked and talked. We were seniors. We were jobless. We were facing a recession. We were first and second generation college kids.  We traded lyrics. We talked about the future without Big and Pac.  We said hip hop died. We said hip hop died again. We asked could hip hop have seven more lives. We talked about what kind people we were becoming. We talked about 80s. We talked about the Stop the Violence campaign. We tried to remember the lyrics to We’re All in the Same Gang. We played Self Destruction.  We grew quiet. We mourned.

What we didn’t expect to happen during the same week was a call from the dean to tell us that campus security found the body of our friend Caryn.  It was a Thursday. She took a bottle of sleeping pills. She left a note. She had been there for days. They said there was a smell. They never told us what the coroner determined was the time of death.

They found her Thursday. Biggie died Sunday.

We mourned. We wondered when was the last time we saw her alive. We retraced every last moment we had with her. We tried to isolate signs. We searched for signals she sent us to tell us something was wrong. We wondered why she didn’t tell us that she was in pain. We wondered if we there was something we could have done to save her. We grew quiet. We wondered when will it stop. We were seniors in college. We were in a recession. We planned a memorial. We packed up her room. We said hip hop had died again. We said our innocence was over. We wondered what kind of people we were becoming.