REM

I found myself watching a short documentary about REM last night, little sweetheart. And although that band wasn't strictly one of ours together, still, it makes me think of you.

The documentary is about one of their lesser known albums but one that I quite like - it's more of a promo, really, I guess - for New Adventures in Hi-Fi. I remember I was in Ireland when it came out and actually bought it just after I got back to London before flying home to New York. Kris and I listened to tracks on Irish radio as we drove along the dark, narrow, country lanes between Bantry and Kilcrohane, which I would visit for last time with you on our trip there together in 2010. Later the album was in heavy rotation at my old band's rehearsal studio in Brooklyn and on the jukebox at McCoy's.

One of the reasons I associate it now with you is that the 8th track - "Be Mine", with it's repeated chorus of you and me, you and me, you and me - played in the background of that little restaurant we used to go to in the Inner Sunset and where we sat one night having something to eat just before you took me to SFO.

Every time I had to leave your side, I would began weeping, often hours before departure.

Later, after your impossible and tragic passing, after I had come back to New York in the short weeks before returning for your memorial (held, ever incredibly, on my own birthday), I spent several days upstate with Sean and Megan and their two little girls, broken, inconsolable. Sean gave me a couple of CD-Rs and I took them with me when I flew back out. The REM one and another I'd only just gotten with you were the two I found myself playing endlessly in the rental car all that week.

The one Sean gave me was a double-disc of live shows recorded in Dublin - Live at Olympia. The other, ours, was the new Radiohead album - The King of Limbs - which had come out just weeks before the tragic events (and which you had excitedly asked me to download as you were driving home from San Jose as I was making dinner for your arrival. We had just begun listening to it together. Those two records were my soundtrack all that week and beyond, filled with sorrow and longing for you, dumbstruck and without compass... the unimaginable hole in my life.

It aches to hear these songs, little sweetheart, our songs. But you told me, didn't you, my love, to listen and remember?

How I love you! How I miss you. How I long, with faith, to find that you are only just around an invisible corner - alive and forever. And that we will be together again, eternal.

With all my love, forever. Forever.