Tech help...

Headed to Tek Serve to try and get your earliest collection of text messages back, my little sweetheart. All I want is just to be able to see them for long enough to write down each and every word so that I may always have them with me until I may be at your side again in heaven. Love you forever...

No Deed Will Go Unpunished...

So, I have this old Nokia cellphone. It was the phone I had before and until Summer asked Mike to get me an iPhone for Xmas. For years I've had it plugged in saving my earliest text messages from her. Today I was cleaning and I noticed it wouldn't power up, so I plugged it in in the kitchen and let it charge. I could see the texts, but an alert kept coming up telling me to set the time and date. Finally I did. After that I couldn't get to the text menu. A different alert just kept flashing, "insert smart chip". I could see other options, especially call history, which had Summer's number, date and time of calls. Finally I thought maybe that old trick of turning it off and back on again. Now, it only shows the "insert smart chip alert". Guess I ruined it.

Dreams...

Dreams of you, my sweetheart have been ever more vivid somehow this week and I awake knowing that you are trying to find and guide and remind me. "Remember" was such a word of yours and I find so potent in my waking hours, missing and longing for you. And trying to do better. To be the person you were trying to help me become and I know even still are now from beyond my earthbound consciousness. Last night into the morning hours I dreamt you were with me. I'd bought some funny old car. I think now awake and writing of it that is a kind of recurring dream of mine. That I have some weird old car some place left forgotten and that I happen upon it or go looking. In this dream, my sweetheart, you were with me and we needed to get the funny old thing back to Davis but we had your Prius with us, too. I was so afraid to part with you. I knew we'd each have to drive one of the cars and had asked if you wanted to take a turn behind the wheel. You said you might like to in a while. Somehow I had the feeling that I was so lucky to have found you again and couldn't bear the idea of leaving your side even for a minute. But the sweetest part of the dream, my darling, through all of the strange, mundane logistics - what a normal, silly thing to dream of, no? - is that we kissed, my lovely girl. We kissed and kissed. And although I always used to close my eyes as our lips met, in the dream, again I couldn't bear to. I kept my eyes open and watched your mouth approach mine and I swear I could feel you. The way only you could ever feel in my arms. The way only you could ever kiss me. And for those moments, be they minutes or hours, in the other place of dreams, I was finally and again at home. You, my home, my love.

Love You Forever....

For my darling sweetheart who passed on to the Beautiful New Place three years ago tonight. See you soon, my love...."She was like that device they use in open heart surgery that cracks your chest open and holds it gaping, wide, so you can be healed. That fragile little muscle, scarred and scared and on the verge of giving out, giving up, held now, tenderly, in her expert hands, beneath her loving, healing gaze... God, how I loved her! My treasure. My gingersnap. Love you. Love you forever. Goodnight, little sweetheart." 

Thoughts...

These days three years ago of our 10 day vigil as Summer lay in the ICU... I remember arriving early every day and staying until late in the night, usually capped by an update from the neurologist. Only two people at a time were allowed in the ICU so we'd take turns standing there beside her, asking the nurses questions, eying the displays that monitored her vital signs, becoming inadvertent experts seizing upon any promising number. I wanted to be there holding her hand as often and long as I could. Her bed was angled up and Summer wasn't laying flat but almost sitting completely up, just reclining slightly with her eyes closed and I could almost imagine her simply asleep. Her left side was the more injured and her arm was in something of a sling, her hand held partly open by a small brace and gauze. Summer famously left a trail of tissues everywhere she went and more often than not if I reached for her hand, she had one balled up in her palm or trailing from her sleeve. When I stood now on her left side and slipped my hand into hers the gauze felt familiar like a palmed tissue, just like always. I couldn't leave. I'd stay for hours holding her little hand, stroking her forehead, whispering into her dear little ear, looking intently into the very bottom of her eyelids opened ever so slightly like a tiny parting in a drape, willing her to stir and wake and say my name and ask for some coconut water. At the end of one of those long days, Summer's dad and I walked out to the parking lot together and he turned and said to me that he needed to know that I wouldn't do anything to myself because if I did it would hurt them even more. I didn't know at first what he meant and asked him what. He said they were suicides in every one of my plays. I don't remember if he asked me to promise him or if I did. I think I just shook my head and said I understood.

Escape from New York...

March 7. Three years ago tonight was our last night. The last night I would fall asleep with Summer in my arms, her head on my shoulder, her sweet little feet hooked around my ankles, holding my hand. And we went to bed a bit early that night. It was a Monday, so it was her day off from doing On The Waterfront but she & I were in rehearsals for Blackbird so she was working double-duty and she was tired. We both were. It had gotten a bit chippy in the afternoon. We were rehearsing at ACT and they kept moving us every other hour. Something went awry with the space rental, with the scheduling, and they kept coming in and making Michael French pack everything up and move us to yet another room, yet another floor. When we got back to the apartment we were beat. I asked Summer what she wanted for dinner and, shockingly, she asked for pizza. We almost never had pizza. And only in New York where Summer liked Two Boots because they have that one with the whole grain crust. So I called for delivery. Some place in The Mission called, fittingly enough, “Escape from New York”. (I put it on my AmEx. I remember because that statement is taped to the wall over my desk. Because that charge is the last one made on my card before the accident. I wrote “still alive” next to it and taped it there after I opened and first read the bill three years ago. I’m looking at it even now…). We ordered pizza and then forgot about it. We forgot because they took like an hour to deliver and when it arrived it was big enough to feed a small battalion. Most of it got wedged into the fridge overnight. We ran lines for a while and then our hands over each other for a much longer, much needed while. Coming up for air at one point, breaking the clench slightly, Summer looked into my eyes and said with a wry smile “you were pretty mad at me today, huh?”. “No! No,” I insisted, well aware that I’m a complete pain in the ass in rehearsal. “I wasn’t really. I’m just…”. “You’re a such diva!” she said laughing. “I know, I know, “ I said. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. And I…. I…” There were more words after that but hard to make out while kissing. I do remember later as we lay there entwined and talking in the kind of whispers that lead to slumbers that she said so sweetly to me, “all you ever needed was just to meet the right…” “Girl”, I said in the same moment that she said “woman”. And nothing truer was ever spoken. I believe my whole life was a route, circuitous but determined, decreed, leading to her. Summer liked to say that she “found me”. And I like that idea. She found me and I needed to be found so that I could meet her and know her and love her. That’s why I was ever here. I really don’t know why I remain but I suspect (one of her favorite words, “suspect”…) that she holds that answer for me, too. Goodnight, little sweetheart…

Wednesday....

Summer’s tragic accident and passing occurred over these very days in March three years ago. I think about her always and write quietly of her, filling notebook after notebook, and here. Someday soon I will share it in full. Just now... just now....

One thing I remembered as I saw parishioners filing out of the little chapel on W. 51st St today on my way to the Hudson for a run, was how completely dizzied and surreal things seemed outside the ICU the next morning after that first night at the hospital. A combination of shock and sleeplessness, and being shuttled in the middle of the night from the harshly florescent lit visitors room we had been placed in upon arrival (a garbage can holding the door ajar so it wouldn’t lock every time we ventured to hear some word or find a restroom), to the slightly more private and comfortable “consultation room”  where we would spend the next week in vigil. After dawn- still in boots I pulled on without socks racing down the stairs to the street and Summer’s side, still in my blue hoodie, zipped all the way up because I’d torn the t-shirt from my chest to wrap around her sweet, wounded head, kneeling on the sidewalk waiting for the ambulance to arrive - after dawn that next morning, walking to the drinking fountain I discovered that we hadn’t been led, as I thought, to an entirely new floor, but just around the corner. The middle of the night move hadn’t taken 10 minutes, it had probably taken 30 seconds, but time was nothing. Nothing I could any more understand. Soon the overnight empty halls began to crowd with activity. My last day with Summer was over. The first day of the vigil was begun. I couldn’t understand at first the strange sight of blackened foreheads. People passing by with a cross smudged above their… oh, yeah - it was Wednesday. It was Ash Wednesday. Now, I remembered. And now. Now I remember remembering….