2.14.22

When you told me you had been writing, I pretended that I didn't know and that I hadn't stumbled on your writing late last year. I pretended I didn't know in the way I pretended I hadn't been writing either when all this time I had been writing in a similar direction as you. Not to you or for you but through you and around you. I thought maybe my words were the wind and somehow they would brush past you as you walked down the street; and when it did you would turn in the direction the wind blew and ask: "Who was that?" or say quietly to yourself: "I'm certain that was somebody I knew." 

Did I tell you this story before? On my 21st birthday, when we all hiked up to the Wisdom Tree together, I read a note from that box under the tree. It read: "After you died, I couldn't find you anywhere. Now I feel you everywhere." This to say, I think I have died many times in the way the living do. This is to say, I remember you even when I am only knowing you now or even after I think I have known you. This is to say, we become everybody but ourselves. 

Everybody I love becomes a part of me and suddenly I am writing to my most devoted, myself, but also you, always. I'd seen your writing accidentally somehow, in the stream of the things. I'd stumbled onto your writing and suddenly your voice filled the room of my mind and I felt like I was staring into the sunlight over the ocean. It was startling. I went downstairs to drink a glass of water, hands shaking. I was sure, in a self-centered way, that you were speaking to me. Or, not to me or for me but with me. And in that, you were speaking to yourself. With yourself. 

After we talked in the park, I thought about friendship and how to live a life with depth. These two things will preoccupy me to my grave, I'm sure. I think I came to Earth to make some good friends. Life longs for itself. It takes so long to love somebody and I'm lucky I still have time left. I wrote in a poem: "Love isn't a way to pass the time/ it's time itself."

I think of the Richard Carver poem "Late Fragment" often: 

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

This is all to say, I've missed you, friend. And thank you.