Losing a friend is one thing. Losing a comrade, an ally, a brother in arms… quite another. Not every death is a loss. The death of Nikola Denić is a great loss.
Nikola Denić, Niksa, just Denić or “brate” to me, was a highly ambitious young man, perhaps too ambitious. A fault I happen to like in an ally. He was well-read, well-mannered, well-spoken in a couple of languages, well-presented and usually well-dressed. But underneath it all, he was just a small-town guy who liked a good cold beer, homemade soul food while we sat in the living room at my place or his watching a game on the tube.
Whenever we had the chance to get together, our conversations on mundane subjects like sports, nightlife and chicks would somehow turn into hours of exchanging thoughts on economy, technology, Silicone Valley IPOs, society, history, health, exercise, heroes of all walks, wars, life in general and the point of it all. Niksa was a smart cookie. He had you all figured out. He knew the ways of your world and he knew how to sell. Which is why he often projected an image of himself quite different from what he was in essence. And it worked. While at times you couldn’t figure out if he was a somber grown man pretending to be a child or a naive child pretending to be a grown man… he was in fact just a simple guy on his way to amazing things.
Our last conversation was on Saturday evening, walking along Bulevar kralja Aleksandra through the fog in the direction of both our homes… I was in a hurry to get home, freezing my ass off and wanted to grab a cab. Denić made me walk. “Screw a cab. Walking will warm you up. Walk faster. You want to stay in shape and keep looking good like you do.” Son-of-a-bitch knew how to work me and that sentence was the essence of him… We parted ways a corner away from his apartment and a couple of blocks from mine. As I finally got into a cab, we both spoke our common farewell – “Be good.”
Nikola Denić, September 6, 1984 - November 23, 2011
Deniću… thanks for having my back when I was down and out in the mess of it all. Thanks for throwing a “just say fuck it” my way in the moments of weakness when I would pay a moment’s attention to the badmouthing and murmurs behind our backs. Thanks, brate, for the good times.
Budi dobar. Ljubim te.
P.S. I know you weren’t a huge fan of Hendrix, but this is a pretty cool song to see you off with, ain’t it, brother?
Danica, better known to most as Niki these days, was born to expat Serb parents and raised on the Iberian Peninsula, with three years spent in the Middle East as she was growing up, and is currently in expat-repat limbo in Belgrade, Serbia. She is a single mom, long-time information junkie and autodidact. Her native languages are Serbian, English and Portuguese. She also speaks Spanish, Italian, some French, HTML and Klingon and is currently working on her Arabic.
