December

I don’t know where 10 years went and I want them back as desperately now as I did then.

I still get mad at how the world keeps spinning. How things just keep moving forward no matter how hard we grip to memory. Still doesn’t seem fair that a world without you, that our lives without you in them are a thing that just IS so easily.

I’m still mad that M had to be the one to contain it all and tell the rest. I would never want that for his heart but it is what it is as he himself would say. I’m still mad that you didn’t hear us, hear me when I told you not to give up, to fight, to stay, in my own stupid little dark jokey way that last visit.

I hope you still pop around sometimes, if that part of the end is possible. I hope you like what you see. That you’re proud of us I guess? That we’re doing the damn thing ok without you despite the hatred down to our bones for having to do it.

Maybe this year will be better than the last…had to break out the A-list this morning. Reminding myself to hold on to moments because in the end, that’s all you’ll have.

What you can remember becomes gold. What you’ve forgotten, gutting.

Stabbing Westward, late night cigarettes and conversation. Confidence in me I could never have for myself (even now). LOTS OF BOOM. Terrible presents to find at 5 AM. Your van, the aztec. Driving back from Spine in the snow. Mario Party. Deathly Hallows release night. The chair. Slurpee runs. Picking up the gang from Cracker Jacks. Tunes at our apartment. Making you dinner. Best nights. Worst nights and days. Tiny moments at our apartments. The most mundane shit I’d give everything away just to have again.

Wanting to dip into the other timelines. If we’d bought that house with the upstairs apartment and that been yours. If the dice roll were different would we have just been the old biddy roomies? Statler and Waldorf for everyone else’s lives? That would have been fucking hilarious.

You’d think I’d be less inclined to go inward after you. That part, I’m working on it alright? Leave an old Eeyore bitch be. Ok, that’s just me being an asshole again because it’s easier than being honest.

Peopling is hard. Connecting is hard. Resting too hard on what was instead of continuing to nurture and build because I don’t think I’m wanted or worth it. That old chestnut never dies, no matter how many sessions I gab through. All the work can’t seem to crack that fucker. Still doesn’t make me feel any less like shit that I can sit here, think about my people literally every single day and say…nothing. I’m the fucking phantom of the opera of my friends. Just over here half behind the curtain cheering you on, having nothing but blind faith in you and saying fuck all about it. Ok that gave me a fun idea for a tattoo that would only be funny to me. Cheerleader with stitched up mouth. That’s horrifying and perfect.

Oh that’s a thought I could have gone without. The days you’d go to Em’s and leave your door locked and the alarm would wake me and M up. Knowing some of the why and it breaking my heart. Still does just in a different context with everyone else. And now I have fucking Kayne in my head from M’s alarm from back then too. Ha, remember my window leaking that first night…we were cursed with leaking homes with Oaks after that too. Actually shit that’s probably just me considering this house too.

Even though those last few random stop outs and all night movie sessions came from a place that I wish they hadn’t, I hope you know I loved them. Those were some of the few times I felt like you were my friend too. Not just another one of M’s friend that tolerated me. Oh the dumb ass shit we watched and some that linger. Ha. Linger, get it? We were so dumb, I love it.

I miss you buddy. I wish we all had you in our lives still. There’s just something gone in varied trios without you I can’t quite put my finger on anymore. Like you were this perfect in between. Lil bit of Polish glue.

It all went too fast and it scares me that the runway ahead of you is growing little by little longer than the one behind.

I’ll keep remembering, I promise. You don’t die here. I refuse. Don’t Die.

9

My heart still drops straight to my shoes sometimes. I don’t know that I’ll ever really get used to this process. The repetition of loss. Lather, rinse, repeat. Maybe a part of me is numbed a bit between you, Jess and Grams. Yet I know there’s more big ones to come, that will gut me all over again. That the people left to help me stitch back the pieces will be less and less because that is the very nature of loss.

I don’t want to be our Mark. I don’t want to be the witness.

Course I never thought I’d outlive either of you and yet here we are.

There is a matter of luck in all this. Luck that out of all the collections of atoms that could meet and become friends on this hunk of rock hurtling through space, mine got to exist by yours for a while. Luck that Marty remembered my phone number after our years apart. Luck that Amy and I decided to go to that show. Luck that I went to Denny’s that day. Luck that any of us every got to exist at all. You’re a gift. You all are. To me, to each other. To our little circles that cross in just the right little venn diagram that is life.

In my head, I hope the end is like Supernatural. Everyone gets their own version of the afterlife. I hope you got your ice cream cone, that you’re working on your parents convertible at a country home in the hills and you know why.

The ebbs and flows of try are for you. All of you. I have a harder time being brave if it’s just for me. Despite all the work it’s still hard to see the worth in that.

I just want to go see a show again and feel the way we did back then. Stupid, young, free, a little bit dumb about so many things and so smart about so many more.

My heart misses you, my head even more. Sometimes I wonder what the alternate universe of us could be. Where we’d fit in everyone’s lives now.

Could we love as hard as we do if we hadn’t had to lose you? I don’t know, but as much as I try not to take that for granted it is what humans do best after all.

Don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. These are the good old days. Wish somebody would have told me then that ours were too.

Go see Jess and Gram for me. Have her make you the brocolli soup and some potato pancakes. Trust me, they’re amazing.

Miss you, A2. Always.

8 of Swords

Eight of Swords Tarot Card Meanings tarot card meaning

UPRIGHT: Negative thoughts, self-imposed restriction, imprisonment, victim mentality

REVERSED: Self-limiting beliefs, inner critic, releasing negative thoughts, open to new perspectives

Still just out here trying to find meaning where there may be none at all and missing what could have been.

40

What would you be like at 40?

Knowing how all of us have grown, mostly I just think you’d be a solidified version of exactly who you always were.

Let’s be real, no one really walks away from our neurosis around here. We own them more, know how to work them more, but yet, they remain. Just me? Maybe just me.

A little part of me wonders if another year of vanity would have slipped in there somewhere between 35 and now. Hard to live with the fact that you never even saw 35.

So close, and yet so far.

7 Years Has Gone So Fast

Forgive the Green Day but there are only so many instances in life where one can use that line and have it mean something.

If there’s any year where I think all of us really would have liked to see how you would handle things, it’s 2020. This is the closest we’ve ever gotten to the kind of world in which your prepping tendencies would have been incredibly useful and also I’m sure a point of ego boosting for you. I can almost hear the I told you’s and I kind of love that.

This morning, as has somehow become more routine for me, an intrusive thought popped in. One I have a lot, but I wonder more and more one I think maybe you and Jess had too. You were wrong, just so you know. Maybe I am too but that feels less real than being able to say both of you were because I can see it for you…just not for me.

Remember those WWJD bracelets? You don’t even want to know how many times WWAD has come up in conversation. Actually, maybe you would. Nevermind.

I still miss you. I still think of you every day. I really do feel like that’s the right way to live with grief. Letting go and not thinking of the people you lost doesn’t solve anything. Forgetting doesn’t help, facing does. I’m glad I stopped seeing that therapist. My current one would never suggest such a thing. If anything she’d ask what action I was going to take with my feelings. Ok, you feel it, what are you going to do with it?

Today, what we’re going to do is go grab your copy of The Fountainhead that M was so kind to let me have for awhile. I’m going to go through it and grab lines you marked and make a little art with it. Let’s see just how bad at Photoshop I’ve gotten.

Channeling another dead person I so admired today. Let’s see what we do.

“Take your broken heart, and turn it into art.” – Carrie Fisher

I’m not okay. I hope you finally got to be. Miss you, always.

The Maggie Wall

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Bart and Lisa ask Homer and Marge why there are no pictures of Maggie in the house. Ultimately this culminates in Homer telling them he has all the pictures of her where he needs them the most to lift him up, work.

My cube is pretty much my Maggie wall, even more now that I’ve re-printed some old favorites with Jess and Aaron in them. I can’t physically see you guys anymore, at least I can have you here with me I guess.

I don’t hate my work or feel stuck in it nearly the way Homer does, but having these visual reminders of the times past and the people I made into my family helps.

Especially lately, I need em. I need youse.

The Gift

Give my love to my friends. 
You have to take care of them now. 
You have to take care of each other. 
You have to be strong. 
The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. 
Be brave. Live. 
For me.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Season 5 – “The Gift”

I did it. I finally fucking did it and of course now I wonder why I waited so long.

Fear. That’s easy.

There’s a lot packed into three little words and one punctuation mark. I guess I’ll start with the main inspiration, discovered by me on reddit not too long after Aaron. I saw a trend of people getting semicolon tattoos or tattoos with semicolon’s in them. That led me to https://projectsemicolon.com/ and I was sold. I needed a tattoo with this involved.

The project aims to remove the stigma of talking about suicide and uses donations to help organizations like themselves in their goal. Their focus and work with teens stuck me as that’s when my own struggles began.

After Aaron, I thought about that episode of Buffy, and how I sometimes repeat the ‘The hardest thing in this world is to live it it. Be brave. Live” part to myself. Seemed fitting. The idea was born to put the two together, but like all my other tattoo ideas, I’ve just sat on it.

Jess was the last straw. So fuck it. Really the phrase for me is a nicer version of ‘fuck it’. You get one life, live it. Be brave. Do cool shit. Also, completely acceptable to be at home living a chill ass life. All are welcome.

I fucking did it guys. Holy. Shit.

I don’t know

I’m pretty sure there’s a tiny little girl in my heart
Crying because all her favorite toys have been taken away
I’ve shut her in, keeping her screams at bay
I can deal with shutting her in easier than living without you
So here we go, another layer to the wall
Another dark joke instead of truth
Tears for some and stone for others
Shields up captain
Second star and straight on until morning

Dias de los muertos (amended)

*Updated 5/22/2019

If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.

The Crow

The days you came, the days you left, they’ll never stop being celebrated as long as I breathe.

January 16
March 1
March 2
March 19
May 10
May 19
June 29
July 8
September 10
October 19
October 31
December 20

How Can I Hold On

You could say it’s been a banner fucking mail day in my household. I’m not sure if you would share in the sheer joy I’ve held or if you’d make fun of me.

Marty and I jammed a bit, I’ll give these another full listen during some lone time later on.

For what it’s worth, I’m eternally glad we were both at that concert, even if we didn’t know it until years later. Miss you.

Year Five

There are so many things about grief we don’t talk about. So many tiny elements in our minutes in the after that go under the radar unless you’re also living them. 

There is a connection felt with those who carry loss with them. Our atoms feel each other. 

The stages of grief are bullshit. You’ll feel every one of them on and off from day to day, month to month, year to year. Monday I might accept you’re gone, Tuesday’s denial and Wednesday too, Thursday I’ll be angry at you and Friday I’m back in shock. 

Other people live in a timeline where there are limits for your emotions around your loved one. Fuck that. You feel whatever you need to feel when you need to feel it. You’re not wrong for laughing two days after you lose someone and you’re not wrong for being a blubbering mess years after. 

You’re never the same after you lose someone. Death changes you. Your life becomes a time before/time after split. It sucks. 

Memories you make after get this really fun new layer of guilt with them because inevitably you think at some point ‘man, I wish X was here/could have seen this/done this/existed in this moment’.

There will be an insane amount of pressure from outside forces to move on. You may tell a therapist to fuck off for suggesting that you accept and release a loved one from your daily thoughts. 

You will hurt. Mentally, physically, emotionally. You’re going to feel some shit. You’re going to learn to carry it with you, you’ll earn the strength to do it, but it’s a bitch of a journey. 

Closure is complete bullshit. 

You’re going to find comfort in very unexpected places. Embrace the comfort no matter where it comes from as long as it’s not hurting you or someone else. 

Your last moments with them alive will replay in your mind. A lot.

Life events and milestones will be bittersweet. Places you go will have a tick mark of before and after.

Woot offs are never as fun.

You will find an exorbitant amount of things in day to day life that will remind you of the person you lost. This may lead people to question why the sight of BAWLS suddenly turned you from a smile to looking like someone kicked your puppy. 

Slurpees will never taste as good. Giant pickles and pickled sausages will have more emotional weight than such objects probably should. 

People will play grief Olympics a bit. Let them, you know how you feel, love is not a show you have to prove to anyone. 

You’re going to feel numb sometimes and raw others. 

Meeting new people who have never/will never know your person is weird as hell. You’ll never feel like you describe them effectively or give their personality justice. 

You may buy movies and never watch them purely because they remind you of them. 

Explaining your person died doesn’t get easier. If anything it gets harder to hear ‘I’m sorry’ or worse yet no reaction at all to this information.

Sometimes, you’re just going to need to throw up. 

Anyone that judges your grief process deserves swift removal from your existence. 

What you lose with that person will sting. You will learn things and be pissed you cannot share them. You will hear songs and be pissed they will never hear them. 

You will wish you had taken every ounce of knowledge from them you had and saved it to a million hard drives for safe keeping. You’ll wonder when humans will get cloud backups. You’ll laugh because you know they’d see the security flaws in that and hate that you even suggested it.

Loss is loss. There is not a scale for worth that differs between friends and blood. 

You will blame yourself. You will reply conversations wondering where you went wrong. You will blame others. You will blame yourself for not noticing the mistakes of others. You will blame science, religion, existence itself.

Nothing you do or that you learn about them after will really change the love you hold for the person that died. They earned it. They get to keep it.

Everything really is pretty fucking awful. 

Music will run the gamut between healing and breaking you all over again.

The dead never really leave us completely. The indents in our hearts they built carry on in every tiny thing that reminds us of them.

Traditions will continue or be built from the ashes. You’re so special you get two holidays in my life now. 

You really don’t get over it, you don’t even get used to it. You just learn to survive it. 

You will cherish every hug you ever shared. Especially when it took years before you had them in the first place.

Still waiting on my email from the afterlife. If anyone would figure that out, it’d be you.

You will miss sharing a sink with the year of vanity. 

Concerts will never be the same. 

Cliche bullshit will become amusing.

If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.

I miss you, Aaron. Always.

Big Little Thoughts

I wish the number 4 wasn’t so important to us.

Every time I watch the news I flip between relief and sadness that you aren’t here to experience this world, and the total fuckery we find ourselves in.

I still can’t hear those songs.

I haven’t been able to watch that movie again, every time I try I end up turning it off.

Sometimes, the envy I hold for your non-existence scares even me.

I can’t look at Jason Ritter without thinking of you.

I always half intend to actually go to that Polish festival we found, but I probably never actually will.

Every concert I’ve been to has been a little bit for you.

This year my desire to have you here has been less for me, more because your support was so needed.

Grief is love’s unwillingness to let go.

Today will always knock the wind out of me.

Paint’s Peeling

Miss you

Sir Dukamus

Well fuck.

Here were are again. Another loss. Another blow to the souls of my nearest and dearest and not a god damn thing I can do to patch things up.

I’ve decided anyone that says something along the lines of ‘they’re just a pet/dog/etc’ immediately gets on my ‘bad blood’ list. Fuck you people, you are not capable of love the same way we are then and thus, fuck you.

I don’t get close to many people or things, but I can definitely say that Duke’s fuzzy ‘got food for me’ face has been a comfort, joy and band aid for me at times when I most needed it. Best Neph-pup ever. No one else has ever been so excited to see me they peed. Can’t even count how many times his fuzz caught my tears as well as my pets and snugs. I’m blessed that I got to live with him for a bit, have his happy barks to welcome me no matter if it’d been 10 minutes or 10 months since he’d seen me.

I can’t verbalize this loss any better than I’ve been able to Aaron’s. All I’ve got is dark humor. Joking about it is the only way of opening my mouth without screaming. Still find it funny that my agnostic little brain most likes the idea of a conscious afterlife when I don’t want to let go.

Hope you find Aaron, Duke, and when you do, you’re so excited you pee on his shoes.

Well. Fuck.

TFW you get physical items with your art on them for your DFA and you’re having ALL.THE.FEELS.

So, I did a thing. A thing I have no idea will be well received or may get me called a giant cunt. I’m hoping for the first one but history tells me it might be that second guy.

I just thought it was a cute, stupid, fitting way to have a thing that ties what’s left of us together. One hoodie at a time. I hope you like this, dude, you’re part of this stupid little group of IT misfts like it or not. He’d want it that way, and I feel like he’d get a laugh out of this while I am a weepy.fucking.mess.

ANGST + HUGGINGS

I saw this the day it was released. My immediate thought was to share it to you on FB, and then I remembered. That nagging little bitch that is reality reminded me that, if I do, it doesn’t really matter. Cuz you’re dead. Someone else might enjoy it, but the inside joke of it, the ANGST, the HUGGINGS response wouldn’t happen because, you’re dead. Still, here I am, writing a thing to a dead person. Like ya do. Izzard is never the same, Spine is never the same, Rilo is never the same. Nothing is the same. Time shifts that, but there are too many moments where an instant of joy gets insta-fucked out of existence because this is our reality.

My want to share will never go away, but there’s this weird level that goes with doing so now, because your page is still there. The eyes are still on it, and I don’t necessarily want those eyes on me.

D-Day Part 3

Today is one of those days I wish Facebook had an option to not allow comments. I didn’t say what I did for anyone but you. Maybe it was better put here but there is that little social nuance that comes with having a dead friend. Expectation might have been a better word there but you get me. If I say nothing, am I an asshole? If I say something that has meaning to only a few it invites jokes and questions that are inappropriate and force me to have those conversations of why I posted what I did in the first place. Followed by inevitable apologies and rehashing all the why.

Fuck it, I thought it was an appropriate in thing to do. Just as much as including some binary in my tattoo if I stop dragging my damn feet will be. That’s my little nod to you, to the computery nerds that we are and the people we wanted to be.

The world keeps turning, but it will never be the same. There’s a dark corner of my mind that realizes how easy it is for things to keep spinning after a loss, and that little bitch can sod right the fuck off today. Things do keep spinning but it’s far from easy. Some days are a whisper, some days are ear bleeding decibels to my fragile little heart.

This year in particular there have been moments I’ve just wanted you to exist in a tangible way again. Purely selfish ones, when I wanted an Aaron hug or laugh to stave off the pain of what was going on for a minute. Funny too how many moments I wanted you to exist were perfectly mundane and ordinary, just with a tinge of ‘man, he’d love this’ or ‘I wonder what he’d say about this’.

There’s still some Inigo left in me – I want my friend back you son of a bitch. Always find it amusing I want a ‘god’ to exist just to have something to be mad at that has a face instead of the reality of the nothing.

Well now I’m just thinking about Artax drowning in the mud and fuck balls did not need that today.

All this is to just say that I miss you and I’m annoyed by the expectations and obliviousness of the world as per usual. So, yeah.

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

Dawned on me that I did actually make all those old letters to you public, for whatever that’s worth. Been awhile, which it really hasn’t considering how many mornings I sing in my car or talk to the air like it’s you. Songs are getting a little bit easier to take but there’s some bands I still instinctively skip. Just can’t take it yet.

Conversations with M lately on all things worldly harken back to many a conversation on the floor in the old apartment in the wee hours. Once you were really my friend too, not just that guy I knew. So often lately I have been wishing so hard that you were in the midst for our conversations, knowing you would have your views and that they’d be fantastic in one way or another.

I remember so clearly that first year after you were gone. How many people would tell me it gets easier and all those little lies we tell ourselves to survive. I nearly fired my therapist for suggesting that I ‘let you go’. That struck me as such an insult at first, but given the complete breakdown I had just had in her office I can understand why that would be the suggestion made. Letting go, accepting is supposed to be end goal of grief I guess. Thing is, that’s not how I roll. Acceptance to me feels like forgetting and I refuse to forget you. I listen to the few voicemails and videos I have of you when I need to hear your laugh. Those are precious commodities to me now in a way I never anticipated. Sometimes just those few words, hearing you say my name is exactly what I need to not throw in the towel.

I’m trying to be brave. I’m trying to live. If not for me, I guess I do it for you. I realize how hopelessly romantic that sounds (not in a creepy way, whatever there’s love in friendship so the fucking cliche works).

Maybe this is the practice I need to start? Just stream of consciousness to you like I do in the car? Better than not writing at all, even if it is useless bullshit.

Miss yer fuckin face, man. Miss yer brain. Miss ye.

That was…interesting.

Hi friend.

So that was a weird experience I hope I don’t have to repeat for at least a decade. Seeing you in that medicated fog was the one silver lining of it all, that’s for sure. I just wish I could remember more than your face and the feeling of it all…

525,600 Minutes

Well, here we are.

What I said this morning in social media realm wasn’t for me. Truth, yes, but it was the kindest way I could think of to say something and not expose more than needed to be said in such a public realm. This, since really only M even knows it exists. This…this is for me.

Fuck it.

I’m still angry, man. Less now at you for being simply a damaged, stubborn ass of a human being than angry at myself for not being a better human myself. Yet, if I’m really honest, it’s not like I’ve been a better friend since your parting…all my wishful thinking and bursting heartstrings falter when I actually have to take action. Better on the sidelines, Eeyore in the wings observing but never wanting to be a bother to anyone.

I want to be angry with God, but given I’ve never been certain of such a creature even that seems a fruitless venture. Really, if there was a God what could I question aside from why now? Why not when we’re in our 80’s? As if that loss would hurt any less?

Doesn’t matter when someone is taken from you, it only matters that they are taken. The piece still goes missing, the scars still have to form.

I want to help B so badly, but I don’t know that there is anything I can say or do to ease the struggle on that end.

We all just have to make our way I guess. Understand, we’ll go hand in hand but we’ll walk alone in fear.

I hate today. I hate it because for the vast majority of this day I was unconscious. If anything I’m pissed that in that space our consciousness didn’t get to meet one last time. Hearing the words still makes no sense, felt like such a dream. Guess I should be thankful for anesthesia to some extent. I’m not sure I could have coped with being fully conscious for that affair.

There’s got to be a dark joke in my being sterilized the day your light burnt out but I can’t find it just yet…

Sigh, I just miss you. We all miss you.

If ever there could be a sign that the afterlife existed, it’d be you wiring up a connection back here…still keep waiting for my e-mail from the afterlife…part of me will always be.

Almost a Year to the Moment

I’m realizing as this day moves forward that it’s been more than a year since I’ve talked to you in any media format.

I don’t honestly think I spoke to you this day a year ago…or even a few days prior.

I’m still not ready for this…but maybe that’s just how it needs to be.