I wanted to talk to you today, and hug you. I was going to call you after class. I want to share a bed with you and hang out and talk about everything and fucking laugh and laugh and make fun of each other and fall asleep just before the sun’s up and go back to three years ago in that moment and stay there forever and ever and stop you from dying. I love you.
This Christians on Fire bullshit has gone too far. Mike. My best friend for 5 years; avowed atheist for three. This guy knows him for 10 minutes and tells a crowd of 100 brainwashed folks that he was passionate for the Lord. I can’t believe the rage I’m feeling from this. It is not okay to use my best friend as a fucking tool in advancing some agenda.
I eat at places where we used to go and choose the seats where we used to sit and try to connect with something that I know can’t ever be sitting across from me.
read over our texts from the last year.
hardest thing i’ve ever done
i miss you like i never imagined i could miss anyone
i lost my brother
it’s really fucking hard
i can’t believe.
i can’t believe i’ll never meet anyone like you again
i can’t believe you’re gone
but i have to
but i just don’t want to
I wrote this once.
Her mind appeared perpetually youthdrunk, and he was always longing for the serum (or poison) that took her there. Her incorrigible optimism and naive bravery within eyeshot of the overwhelming-everything made him weak in knees and spirit, sometimes leaving him nearly in-tears and shattered form.
And other times, well, those other times he led
the way, cutting away at the underbrush and producing his own flavour. He’d speak freely with stunning eloquence and emphatic, almost painful heart. And he spoke beautiful truth, in expression and pretense.
Then on those days when they both were free of generational inhibition they would take on adventures of the retrospectively fool-hardy genre. Together they would accomplish feats that, separately, would make them blush at the very mention of the stemming thought.
And in their locked eyes (their eyes were always meeting in every setting, no matter) there was contained wild; raging wild held in by delicate glass, only to the degree that you knew for a goddam fact they’d burst and break, only they didn’t.
Though he was never certain of hue, he’d mastered aesthetics and for that knew her robustness therein.
Of course, most feelings know transience, and most young eventually discover temperance. When that happens, they’ll have nearly nothing. When they both meet with the sobriety of middle-adulthood, the shaking, standard reality of career-bound, goal-oriented, 9-to-5 living, most of what they know and share will die, fearful of suppression in their coming-of-average-age.
But still something will struggle to breathe there and they’ll both know it and they’ll both acknowledge it independently and it will take only one chance meeting in a flurry of sick days and time off and maternity leave and disability and even ability when they’ll not be thinking and in a sudden flood of sepiatic-nostalgia both return to try the drying tap and try and try so eagerly for just a sip, just a taste, even just the memory of being care-free, or philosophical, or more adventurous, or less judgemental; of being youthdrunk, again, together.
They’d realize that happiness is knowing that in the one second you’d convinced yourself to stop thinking about the other, the other had just realized they couldn’t cease to think of you.
Christmas is wrapping gifts for my family and working my way through this fabulous, large bottle of beer.
It’s pouring anxiety outside; the wipers struggle to sling it off the windshield so I might see clearly for a second before the next touchdown. My tires rip through small puddles of motor-oil and loss, so I hydroplane something emotional but quickly regain control, just to lose it again as I enter a turn too fast thinking it’ll be alright. I’ll roll down the window because I’m choking a little bit on the full-blast heater and my radiator eyes steaming over.
Listened to Holocene and Towers back to back for the first time since losing Mike; instant breakdown moment. I hope these don’t go away.
Some days are harder than other days, and some days are even worse, and then some don’t even need to be called days; just seconds smashing minutes into hours, pushing up the sun then pulling it down. Days that are preceded maybe by a dream of a friend you’ve brought back to life, a friend who tells you “I was just fucking around, just playing a joke” and you all laugh at the absurdity of it because all the sadness and aching in your body escapes in a murmur of “man, I’m so glad it wasn’t real, but how’d you manage to seem dead for two weeks?” then the alarm goes off and the reality that you see through bleary eyes is there, laid out on the chair next to your bed - slate slacks and a black button-up. Your dream wasn’t good enough to really make things okay again, it was a reprieve from the reality that he really is gone with his body somewhere above ground and today’s sole purpose is to locate the body and put it inside the ground while people talk about Jesus and a loss for us but a gain for heaven and you just want to yell goodbye, my brother. And you just want to have a few more inside jokes and a beer or two and show him the band you know he’ll love and that funny video on the internet that only he would find as funny as you, and you remember that you can’t because dreams aren’t reality and reality is here and here is where you are and here is where he isn’t.
