Another year, wishing you were here.

"WHAT WILL YOU DO, HERMIT CRAB? WILL YOU PULL DOWN THE STARS? WILL YOU SMASH THE MOUNTAINS LIKE SHY COCONUTS TO FIND THEIR SECRETS? ... WHO ARE YOU TO DEMAND REASONS?"

"WHO ARE YOU?"  -T.P.

I feel like I should re-learn to write/think/feel something else.  Or else bury it to put it to rest, deeply in the soil of my words.  Allow the 27 to fade/sprout/pale into 28...

For to beget flowers, perhaps?  For to forget the unmemory of it all, and to pretend once more?

Or if not in pretending, then as an unwilling witness, remembering again what it feels like to see.  To see something other than that thing - that thing she can't not see.

-L (12/10/12)

"We. Featuring the words of Arundhati Roy." (Revisited.)

The grief is still deep. The rage still sharp. The tears have not dried. And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else's loved ones or someone else's children, will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory.
...
It's not a clever-enough subject to speak of from a public platform, but what I would really love to talk to you about is loss. Loss and losing. Grief, failure, brokenness, numbness, uncertainty, fear, the death of feeling, the death of dreaming. The absolute relentless, endless, habitual, unfairness of the world. What does loss mean to individuals? What does it mean to whole cultures, whole people who have learned to live with it as a constant companion?
...
Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

(From Come September, by Arundhati Roy.)

http//www.weroy.org

Just in case you missed it the first time.

-L (11/10/12)

10/10/12

Sister,

Two years today.  Two years too late.  "I'm sorry but you missed her, Mr. Mystery to me.  How lost you seem to be."  This year, like last year.  None like the year before.  Everything, being changed now - and then what happened next.

Rather than fading or dulling or making sense, my missing you has become an empty thing, hungry like nothing living is.  No memories seem able to fill it.  And how limited they are, from the very get go.  Sometimes I have to not look at them at all, knowing this well that they do not look back.

I'm sorry that I'm not lighter by now.  I'm sorry that I've yet to let your sweet life make up for your bitter death, here in my own broken heart.  So many things have happened that I'd like to share with you.  But also, no time has passed at all.  It's like you took it with you.

Every day I love you more.  Everything feels exactly the same, and is altogether different.

"Still here.  Still loving you more than life."

<3, -Sister

[702]

[How she's just gone.  How her absence rings truer in the presence of the context in which she belongs.]

[How the loneliness of missing her is compounded by the fact
that she was the person in this life who would have been able to lighten it.]

[How the places that comforted morph into reminders.]

[How the line between love-for-love and love-for-purpose is drawn
with as many peaks and descents as a machine upon which a life is measured.]

[While the living life still lives.  Even if only slightly.]

[-L (9/10/12)] 

"Out west is the only sky that's blue. So tell Katie that I'll see her soon."

That Much Further West (4:27)
by: Lucero

I tried but I can't run no more.
So tell Katie it's her that I adore.
As long as I love her best,
I'm that much further west.

And since she's been gone,
I've done less right than I've done wrong.
But I ain't that much worse than the rest,
just that much further west.

And the boys, they don't need my help.
They can play these songs by themselves.
Well I ain't that much worse than the rest,
just that much further west.

Out west is the only sky that's blue.
So tell Katie that I'll see her soon.
'Til then the thoughts that I have left,
are that much further west.

-L (8/10/12)

"We cannot relinquish butterflies and return to uninterrupted road." -A.L.

Birthday number twenty-eight.  And three days from taking the bar exam.  Not the most mixable of substances, but we're pulling it off anyway, nonetheless.  Not that time gives us much of an option in the matter.

Things like the essays in this book help: http://www.scribd.com/doc/93144782/Things-That-Are-Essays-by-Amy-Leach

As do sunset sailing trips, and celebratory supportive words, and demonstrative love coming from (almost) all directions of our life.  And books, too.  Lots of books.  (Books that aren't legal treatises.)  Promising themselves to us - in now less than five days and counting...

Counting down to being fully present again.  Maybe you'll notice when it happens.  Maybe you won't.  Maybe I can say the same about me.

And maybe we'll just have to wait and see.

-L (7/21/2012)

[640]

[One year and nine months later, and today I found myself faking an exam, taking a risk, and getting a re-taste of perspective.]

[I went to my sibling grief group tonight. And A, who doesn't say too much, said this - speaking of her brother, dead at 14: "He missed everything. Everything. All the milestones. So then you just live them alone..."]

[Her voice breaking, right alongside my heart. It fell/twisted/pumped with understanding. Long after his had stopped beating.]

[She was 16 at the time. Seven years later, and her oft-held back tears flowed now just as freely, knowing what she knew. What she wished she didn't. Like how to this day, she said, she'd never been able to picture him as an adult. Or how her parents' ugly divorce had just kept right on going, even right after...]

[The sun this afternoon felt like it had a hot bone to pick with someone, and ignited all who dared cross its crosshairs. Was it you there? There behind the heat? I'd like to think that only your rage would deserve to burn so brightly.]

[-L (7/10/12)]