February 14th. Again.

It's Valentines Day, little sweetheart. I sent you and your mom flowers like I do every year. I wrote this morning - I'm at a part in the book where you and I just went to Shakespeare in the Park one warm August night. I went for a run. 

A week or so ago, I thought to buy a couple of CDs of DCfC. They were, of course, one of the most important bands to us and we discovered them together. I remember all that music and had it in mp3's on my old laptop. It's been impossible for me to listen to them for years, little sweetheart, because I just start weeping, longing for you. Ben Gibbard wrote the theme song to a new show that's on Apple TV - "Shrinking" - and the first time I heard his voice I started crying. That was just three weeks ago, so I should've known.  

Anyway, I put on one of the albums, Plans, tonight. And it sure hasn't changed. I cried and cried and I've barely pulled myself together enough to write this to you, now. 

I remember that you had such a sense of your own mortality having grown up with Type 1 diabetes. And that even after your surgeries, just months before we met and fell in love, that you still thought you would pass before me. I remember you telling me once - in your famous blue Prius, en route to Andronico's on a grocery run - that you wanted me to speak at your funeral and to listen to our music and remember you. I started crying when you said that and between sobs. whimpered "but I don't want you to die before me". You reached for my hand and quieted me down until you could pull into the parking lot and hold me. 

As for what you asked - I did, of course and incredibly, manage to speak at your memorial but the second thing is still very hard, little sweetheart. And it's tricky - some of the lyrics are almost prescient. That's probably why you loved them. 

My heart is full tonight, little sweetheart. Breaking but also grateful. God, how I love you. Forever.    

The New Month

Little sweetheart, it’s April and a flood of memories commit the turning of the month, each year.

I remember, for instance, that it was April 1st when I flew back out for the second long stay in SF that year we tried giving the city a shot together. I’d come out for two late January til mid March, gone back to sort out my sublet in NYC then back to SF, still looking for a place. The second leg was harder than the first and then I got a series of gigs back to New York, which eventually led to you thinking maybe you’d rather we were both here, instead of there. I just wanted to be with you whenever we found ourselves.

April reminds me, too, of our first days together, really begun that first year in February but growing so strong by April and your first visit here in May. I only really got to have my birthday with you one year, the second one, when you took me to see DCfC in Sacramento and made me spectacular birthday cupcakes as we decamped to the house in Davis alone for the week - possibly the happiest one of my life.

April reminds me too of the saddest, hardest days of all. Returning to New York for the three weeks between your funeral and my speaking at your memorial, held, incredibly on my birthday.

We’re twinned, my gorgeous girl, my beautiful spirit, my little sweetheart, forever. Two halves of the soul.

Live from home!

During this sort of quarantine, little sweetheart, everyone’s kind of at home. Things like plays and concerts and art exhibits all had to close or not open up in the first place. I’m glad we were in the middle of recording and not just about to release and tour.

Anyway, people are finding ways to work around it by filming things at home and sharing them online on YouTube and social media. One of the best ones is Ben Gibbard’s.

DCfC were such an important band to you and I weren’t they, little sweetheart? And for these first two weeks of Shelter in Place, he’s been doing about 50 minute show each day from his home studio, playing guitar and piano and singing songs from the whole catalogue, usually stopping about midway through to answer questions people send in via the comments online.

I’ve been watching since the second night and it made me so emotional to hear these songs that meant so much to us, little sweetheart. I cried and cried. But it’s good, too, I know because you told me to do just that - to listen to our music and remember.

I always will, my love. Always. Love you forever. 

DCfC

Little sweetheart, Sylvia and I walked up to The Met yesterday through Central Park from the west to the east side. I usually take the same route, crossing over around W66th Street near Tavern on the Green, past or through Sheep’s Meadow, past the bands shall and then down the stairs to Bethesda Fountain before continuing on past the Boathouse.

Yesterday there were a couple off buskers, a guitarist and a drummer, playing songs through a small cube amp with both the guitar and a mic for vocals. We walked around past them slowly watching and listening - they’d set out a little box for tips and had their CD for sale -  then sat on the far side of the fountain looking at the surroundings, including the lagoon which was at high tide after all the rain we’d gotten here.

The duo was transitioning into another song, I thought I recognized it. Then it came to me. It was  DCfC’s“I’ll Follow You Into The Dark”. Tears came to my eyes instantly as I sat there listening, little sweetheart. I remembered you taking me to see them in Sacramento for my birthday and how I held you and we listened and swayed and cried together. I walked over to the buskers and put five dollars in their little tip box and put my hand to my heart and said. “thank you”.

You are with me, I know. You are with my everywhere. Until that day when I may truly join you with faith and pure love. Forever. Forever.

Bixby Canyon Bridge

It’s the penultimate day of our road trip, little sweetheart. I’d read in preparation for it that we’d be going over the Bixby Canyon Bridge, known to us both from the DCfC song of the same name. I remember when the album came out, listening to it all and this opening track in particular, over and over. There was a line about “all the way from San Francisco” that had caught my ear and I kept singing it to you. You had to be the one to point out that, as often was the case with Ben Gibbard’s songs, the pretty melody concealed a very dark, sad lyric. It get that now.

There’s no sign anywhere near the bridge itself. The sight of it is pretty iconic but there’s a second bridge that is not unlike it, so it’s easy to get confused. Sylvia and I were trying to find it on Day 2 as we left Monterrey for Big Sur and it wasn’t until later that we realized we’d already crossed it. On our way back now, we made sure to locate it. It’s pretty spectacular. Maybe there’s no sign, if there ever was one, because fans kept making off with it. That’s my theory anyway.

We both got out and took pictures and when I turned around Sylvia snapped one of me with the bridge in the background. I’m wearing the leather jacket that you gave to me for Christmas, our last Christmas together in 2010. I wear it constantly. Indeed, some of the leather has torn under the right arm and I’m in a bit of a panic about it. I need to try to find a leather restoration place when we get back to NYC.

Meantime, here I am, listening closely and quietly for your voice, your beautiful spirit, your flawless guidance. I love you with all my heart and soul and always always will. Even if, as the song says,  “I’ve still got miles to go”.

With love forever.

Letter to a Friend

Little sweetheart, a friend of mine, Kristen Hartke, who writes a food column for The Washington Post emailed me the other day. She's writing a kind of unusual story about loss - what do people do on the day that is the anniversary of the passing of someone very dear to them. 

 

Well, she thought about you and I, little sweetheart. 

 

She's spoken to a lot of people and learned a lot about how different cultures approach this day and also, of course, how what we prepare, serve and eat may have some special significance or import. 

 

She interviewed me on the phone Thursday night and then I sat down and tried to write out some of the things I had mentioned and told her about. Partly in case I'd forgotten something and mostly so I could say them all to you right here, little sweetheart. 

 

I don't know what, if any, of this might wind up in Kristen's story but, just like always, talking and writing about you - the great gift of my life - brings you closer and comforts me. I love you so! 

 

Here's what I wrote: 

 

 

So, great talking to you Thursday. Your article sounds really interesting and resonant, and, like I said, made me think to write down quickly a few of the things I mentioned.

So… rambling a little about both the Day and food…

My thoughts of Summer are constant. She is always with me. And, of course, the subject and very reason for my work, our work. Bipolar Explorer continues, “of, for and about her”, as I often say. I’ve maintained a little blog, Summerlove, for several years where I write to her. And I’m working on a book of memoirs (the first of three, I hope) about her.

So, Summer is always with me and in my thoughts, every day. But, like we said, this day does come around each year. And despite our sometime intentions that we might better mark our beloveds’s memories by observing their birthday instead of their passing, it comes up on us.

The first three years, I traveled to California to be there with Summer’s parents on the day. The last five, I’ve been here. Over these ones at home, I’ve often been busy marking the day by doing something band-related to honor her. That’s included the releasing of singles “We’ll All Go Together” (2016) , “Watchers and Holy Ones” (2017) and videos for “You Are” (2015), “Dream 3” (2018) and “Necessary Weight” (2019).

So, I’m often busy making something for Summer on the day and forget to eat at all! But food is and was an important part of our life and relationship and continues to be. I loved cooking for her and when I’m in California visiting Mike & Linda, I cook for them each day.

Summer herself loved baking and on her visit here - we met working together in San Francisco and were immediately inseparable, a week after I first returned to NYC, she had booked a flight to visit me the week after my birthday - she wanted to make some cupcakes. She looked around my kitchen doing a quick inventory and spotted a big silver bowl squirreled away at the top of one cabinet, unused for years. I grabbed that down and then she made a list of all the things I needed in my kitchen, we marched up to Bed, Bath & Beyond across from Lincoln Center and procured each item. She made cupcakes that night and from that day forward I was always presenting her with recipes and menus to choose from so I could make dinner for her.

After Of Love and Loss came out in 2012, for more than a year, the band had monthly “couch concerts” here at The Shrine - I’d cook a big meal for the guests, we’d eat and then adjourn to the front room studio and play live for everyone, surrounded by pictures of Summer, songs written for her filling the air. 

On the first “anniversary” in 2012 when I was with Summer’s folks in Davis, we went to the Nugget Market, this lovely grocery in the beautiful little college town where UC Davis resides, and Linda saw a cake she imagined would catch Summer’s eye too. She had them write Summer’s name on it with pink icing.

The Serafin’s have a beautiful house in Davis. Linda herself designed it and it’s where Summer lived when she was going to high school. Her room is still exactly as she left it, her walk-in closet filled with her things and her cotton candy scent. Summer told me of the Davis house with great wonder when we first met and couldn’t wait to take me there. We’d often go, just the two of us, up there from San Francisco, and stay for days on our own, enjoying the garden, watching movies, sleeping late under the canopy of her beautiful bed and cooking.

One year on my birthday, Summer got us tickets to see Death Cab for Cutie, a very important band to the two of us, in Sacramento. We drove up and stayed in Davis. The show was beautiful and emotional and we held each other close and cried. When we got back to Davis, Summer presented me with four different recipe cards she’d selected of possible birthday cupcakes and asked me to pick one. I picked the most over the top chocolate one of the four, of course, and she began laying out provisions. Then she discovered that the hand mixer that was usually in the kitchen had been whisked off to the other house in Yuba City. She was in something of a panic. I noted that it was such a nice friendly pretty little neighborhood and asked if it would be out of line to maybe knock on a neighbor’s door and ask if we could borrow a hand mixer. “Great idea!” she said. “You go do that”.

So, I did. I knocked on the door next door and Mary, their neighbor, very kindly lent me their hand mixer. I told her it was my birthday and Summer & I were there for a few days, Summer making me birthday cupcakes and promised to bring her a couple when I returned the mixer the next day.

The cupcakes were amazing and amazingly complicated. They had molten chocolate inside the batter and all told - prep time and baking time combined - took about 4 hours! I have some pictures of Summer taking them out of the oven and another of her hand-drizzling more chocolate over each individual cupcake there in the beautiful Davis kitchen.

Cupcakes are actually something that I make on Summer’s days, birthday especially, and take around to both my neighbors here on the 5th floor and down the street to the lovely nuns I’ve gotten to know that live in the little rectory across from Sacred Heart. The head nun there, The Mother Superior, I guess, Sister Catherine, is especially kind and always remembers Summer & I. I knocked on the door this year on the 18th and asked if she would say a little prayer for Summer. She took my hand and we stood right there in the doorway and did just that.

I think the thing about food and the day is something that you seemed to have hit upon yourself, Kristen, when I was telling you all this - it’s about giving something to others. That’s so fitting because it’s so very much like Summer herself.

Someone told a story at Summer’s memorial - which was held, incredibly, on my birthday, yet another point of nexus connecting her and I forever. It was an actress, Bree Elrod, who was a cast mate of Summer’s at The Huntington up in Boston. Bree was always wearing a striped wool hat during their tenure there. One day she lost it. And the next day when she got to the theatre, Summer had a present for her - it was a pretty pair of warm striped stockings. Summer told her “I couldn’t bear you going with your stripes!”.

She was so very kind. To everyone. And to me. She saved my life with her endless kindness. She changed me and called me her treasure. She gave of herself. And she taught me everything.

Giving is very much the order of the day. That day, too, maybe more than others, even.

There’s so much more! But I think that’s a few of the things we spoke about... And seasonings! While doing the kitchen inventory here on her first visit, Summer looked through the spices and asked “hey, where’s your seasoned salt?” And (especially Californian) where’s the lemon pepper?” They were in-stock here, then immediately and always. I use them in every savory recipe still to this day. And on the little red table where Summer always set up all her things, her office/make up station, and where we would eat together, where now her things remain, a kind of ground zero of the shrine within The Shrine, a bottle of each - Seasoned Salt and Lemon Pepper - reside.

Okay, hard to bring this to end, as ever, so just signing off with a to be continued and this little excerpt from an interview France’s Indiemusic did with me after our album Dream Together (2017) came out:

“She’s always with us in so many ways. Her passing is entirely tragic. For anybody out there who wonders how you endure, I can only say what a friend told me when I said I didn’t know how I was going to go on or what I was going to do now. He just said, “you’re doing it.” It’s always there, grief. Like if you even breathe a little too hard. I think possibly you learn to carry it. I can’t tell anyone out there that it’s something you ever get over. For myself, I don’t even see that as some goal. I don’t want to “get over” anything that has anything to do with Summer. Not even the most painful parts. I want all of that. I welcome her, ask her to be near me.

I used to say to her all the time, even if she was just going into another room for a minute or only just shifting her weight to grab something from the other side of the bed, “don’t go too far away,” I’d say. I still say that to her all the time. Whether it’s in a quiet moment when I suddenly sense her presence or we’re in the middle of a session and a lyric I wrote for her hits me as we come to it.
Summer isn’t the main reason BPX goes on, she’s the only reason. She is the reason. And I think I can trust that I’m doing things for the right reason if I always know the reason for it is her. Not out of any ambition other than to honor and conjure her. She’s my conscience.”

With love & faith,

M

The Months Ahead

Little sweetheart, sometimes it doesn’t seem as if there are enough moments in the day and other times it seems that the days just go on and on without consequence. Most of the time it’s hard to leave bed and begin another day, I long for you so. Other days, when I do finally rise, I think of the things I want to do to honor and remember and keep you near.

Those are the better days and I have a little index card over my desk reminding me - do the work. I’ve got plans, as strange as it may seem, even to myself, to say so.

When I think of that word, I invariably think of you. Of our plans. Even, so very presciently, the DCfC tee shirt you gave to me with that very word on it.

In the months ahead, may I have more good days than bad. More good, productive days where I do the work left to me as I wait for the hour I may return to you. More days where I find ways to be kind to others and live according to the great example of your own true heart which lights my way.

Help guide me, my angel. And take me to you the moment heaven will allow. With all my love forever.

In Memories...

Little sweetheart, a video of "Transatlanticism", that I posted on FB with the caption "I need you so much closer", came up as a "memory" today. 

From 2009, I suspect the date corresponds with having come back to NYC for jury duty on July 1 and staying on because Wilson Milam asked me to do a play here with him. 

DCfC was an important band to us, wasn't it, my love? You turned me on to them and they became a big part of our musical life. You took me to see them in Sacramento on my birthday that year. We held each other and swayed and cried to the music. I sang the chorus of this over and over to you on the phone more than once and probably did this very day. 

Being apart is so hard. And I once figured out that even tho' we sometimes were, three weeks was the longest we ever were. Always with plans, always knowing we'd be together soon and exactly when. A promise. And even tho' being apart is hard, I always woke with such a feeling of well-being knowing that you were in the world and in my life, even if apart, no farther than a plane ride, a phone call, a text away, and that in a matter of hours I would hear from you. 

It's so much harder now to hold on to that feeling. But I know somehow that you are much closer than I can imagine. I woke today with the thought, "what do I do with all this time I don't want, all this time without you?" I think you're reminding me. It won't be long. Just hang on and do the best I can, right, little sweetheart? Listen for you. Oh, my love. I do. I need you so much closer. (so, come on, come on...) 

With all my love.

April 25th

Little sweetheart, it's my birthday and I am, of course, thinking of you so very much. Below are two pictures of you & I on my birthday in Davis in 2009. Remember? You took me to see DCfC in Sacramento and made me some super complicated and utterly delicious cupcakes. We had several days all to ourselves there. It might've been the best three days of my life, but with you, it was hard to choose. In 2011, we had tickets to see Low in Philly and were meant to be in the studio that weekend working on the new Bipolar Explorer album. Instead, I was giving the speech (also) below at your memorial. My birthday will, fittingly, always be entwined with you, my darling, as is my life and heart and soul. Not without sadness and longing but also with gratitude that you ever found me and faith that you are watching and guiding and will come and collect me the moment that heaven allows. With all my love forever, little sweetheart.


I have a thousand things to say about Summer Lindsay Serafin. A thousand thousand. I’ll be saying them and thinking them and writing them down every day for the rest of my life no matter how brief or prolonged that may be. But today...Just for today...

She liked to sleep. That’s not what I wanna talk about but it has to be said. She loved sleeping. I’m listening to one her voicemails of late and she says she is so excited by the prospect of sleep. That “it is like (her) mouth is watering for sleep”. She says that. It’s good. I sometimes sleep now and just want to stay. I hope I might find her there.

It’s impossible, really. Impossible that I met her. That she “found me” she liked to say. I’m not from around here. It’s impossible that she lived in a place called “The Inner Sunset”. Impossible that she lit me up, this shining person, and held me, safely, in her orbit. Impossible. All of it. And today. Just impossible.

She was a terrible driver. Even Mike said so. I loved her battle-scared Blue Prius. The passenger side mirror in a kaleidoscope thousand pieces, dangling by a cable. A taillight busted. The bumper sagging. No, no she fixed that. The back seat full of boots and sunhats and coconut water. And tissues. She left a trail of tissues everywhere. Like Hansel & Gretel. You could follow it to its source and eventually find her.

She was – words, not for the first time, fail – an unearthly beauty. An ethereal beauty. And shockingly, entirely earthbound. Preternaturally present. She ate up life. With both tiny perfect fists. Ate it up. Actually, she ate quite beautifully. Do you remember that? Cutting and balancing petite bites, transferring them knife to fork with quiet elegance. Even bananas she ate like that. Seriously, I have a picture. I got her to try dark chocolate. She wasn’t a fan at first. She broke little bits off into tiny pieces. I looked over and she was sprinkling Equal onto them one at a time.

She was the dearest dearest girl. Nothing phony about her. If you got to know her at all, your heart just broke in two the moment you realized, the moment you saw her, really saw her and then surged with love. For her. This amazing girl.

She didn’t do anything to make it difficult, but I can understand how someone could think she was hard to get to know. She was friendly but never facile. She wasn’t frivolous. She was serious. She was fun, god, was she fun. She loved people – and this is what I wanna get it, at long last – she loved people and she took them seriously. Not everybody’s up for that. More fool they.

I’m circling the runway here, I know, but there’s one more thing I gotta say before I bring it in – she was a breathtakingly gifted actor. I met her doing Edna O’Brien’s Tir na nOg, Chris Smith’s last play at The Magic. She played the central role, a country girl in the west of Ireland who grows to young adulthood and further adventures in Dublin. And she burned that stage to cinders every goddamn night. With three broken toes. If you live here and you go to the theatre and you did not see her in that, I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t. A year later, right after she was in Rock n Roll at ACT, she went down to Carmel to do David Hare’s The Blue Room directed by Ken Kelleher. I sat there between Linda and Coy and I just thought “god, what am I doing?” I have a perfectly healthy ego. I’m from New York. But I have never seen acting like that. She is like the supermoon. Once in a generation.

She loved her work. And she was good at it. But she had a higher calling. To love. And, yes, that is what I want to talk about. Because she told me. She told me she knew why she was here and that was to love. She was filled with love. So much love. And she wanted more than anything to share her love with others. She told me that. And there is absolutely no doubting it because you could not have a better piece of luck in this world than to have been blessed enough to have been loved by her. 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 shutting down, giving out, giving up, held now tenderly in her expert hands, beneath her loving, healing gaze.

Her love was tenacious, vigilant. Unflinching. I met her three years ago and she quickly became the center of my life. She didn’t drop people. If you were in, she was in. Even if you faltered because nobody had ever shown up for you before like this, she was on you. Checking in. Reminding. Different this time. Not goin’ anywhere. She hated talking on the phone but we talked every day, often for hours. For three. She knew everything about me. Things I never tell became hers.

And she made sure I knew her as well. Her gratitude, her pride in a happy childhood. Loving, devoted, would-take-a-bolt-of-lightning-for parents. Her epic struggle from the age of 5 to live. Ryan’s gifting her a kidney and the double organ transplant that saved and changed her life. The unfathomable loss of Jesse. She carried every piece of her past with pride and love and honesty into every room, knowing exactly who she was, like no one I have ever known. Or ever will.

God, how I loved her! She’s right. She did find me. I clung to her. “Like a liferaft” I told her she was, “to a drowning man.” She smiled and said, “you’re not drowning anymore.”

When my mom died last year, I was in London. I got the news in the middle of the night. I was alone. I called Summer, eight hours behind, here. When I told her, she burst into tears. And then told me to get on Skype. “I want to see you drink an entire glass of water”, she said. “And lie down. And try to sleep. I’ll be right here at my computer watching you. I will watch you while you sleep.” She watched over me like an angel, a cyber angel, and when I woke she was there with Linda getting me on a plane to New York and then on to Michigan. Then Summer flew herself to Detroit and waited in the airport all night to meet my plane. And was at my side every day for a week while I buried my mother. Who does that? Serafin love. Irrepressible, irreplaceable girl.

“When I met you”, she said “you were so wounded, so hurting, so sad – I just wanted to love you, to heal. But I never dreamed”, she added, “I would ever get so much love in return.” Who does that?
I need her. I am broken. That is as it should be. It’s supposed to be hard. She cracked my chest open. It’ll have to stay that way. Because who would go back? But it’s hard.

Summer, incredibly, had an answer for that, I think. All this is preface. She’d want to have the last word. So, I’d like to share that. It’s her Christmas card from a couple of years ago. She was in Boston doing Rock n Roll at The Huntington. It closed just before the holidays and she came to New York to exchange gifts with me. She made me promise to wait until December 25th to open it. So, I took it on the plane with me, waited til Christmas morning and opened it at my Mom’s. The gift was a beautiful blue and grey scarf she knitted. There was also a card. It’s to me but in a way it’s to us all. Everyone of us who she loved. Everyone of us who love her. And feel so lost. Because life is so lonely, the world so empty and wrong without her.

“My Dearest Michael,

I’ve been working on this in the green room and backstage since we came to Boston. I’d drape it around my neck to keep warm while knitting in the dark of the freezing wings. The cast is decisively in favor of the striped color combination.

It’s Christmas day, and I’m wearing my pajamas. I’m in my P.J.’s even if you’re reading this when the sun has set. Ryan is making another bourbon and coke even if you’re reading this as the sun rises. My Dad is reading aloud shocking statistics about religion or politics, my Mom is spraying perfume on the dog, and me...? I am missing you. Maybe one day we’ll spend Christmas together.
 
Coy says “You are where you’re meant to be”, and while I like that idea, I know, far too well, what it feels like to be in a world where everything feels wrong – where everything is wrong. You have also been to that place. And as the world spins on its own axis, people are lost in their own needs and trials. We falter blindly, and strive endlessly. 

But no matter where you are, whether you should be there or not, and no matter who is present... know that you are a treasure in your own right. If the chest is buried, the key is lost, or the map stolen, it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t change the fact that it’s inside you. I just see what’s there. You carry it with you. What’s hidden can always be found.

I love you.
 
Your Gingersnap, Summer"

I love you, too. Love you forever. Goodnight, little sweetheart.

April 25, 2011
San Francisco, CA

Michael's memorial address for the love of his life, Summer Serafin.

The Photo Album

The last time we were in Davis together, little sweetheart, we had several days to ourselves. It was wonderful and I have a thousand memories of things I want to say about it, a thousand more about a thousand other things with you too. But today I'm thinking especially of this one. 

You were looking for some clear plugs for the ear piercings you had recently gotten. Your idea was that you could switch out the studs for the clear ones while you were doing the play in San Jose. We stopped in at a tattoo place downtown and you asked. While the girl was looking for something that might work, a song came on in the shop. It sounded like a DCFC tune neither of us had ever heard. 

They were such an important band to us. You introduced them to me and they quickly became one of our favorites. For my birthday in 2009, you took me to see them at Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento. We stood together in the crowd, you in front of me, my arms wrapped around you tight and we swayed and sang and cried and it was our own. 

In the shop, I asked you if you thought it was them and you told me to use the Shazam app on my phone and find out. It was. It was a song from their record "The Photo Album". I bought it on iTunes immediately and we listened together over those days. 

Today, little sweetheart, I was listening to a playlist on my old MacBook. My current one is in the shop. I didn't have my glasses on and I thought I was putting on another DCfC album, their first, "Something About Airplanes". That one wasn't your favorite so I don't have as much of an instant emotional response to it. But it turned out to be "The Photo Album". It's not as overwhelming as some of the others - "Plans", "Transatlanticism", "Narrow Stairs" - are that we listened to together so often and hit me now so hard. But his voice does take me to you. 

I only played the first song because I saw that there was something in the playlist info that had the date listed "last played" and all the rest of them had the date March 4, 2011. 

Four days before your tragic accident. Four days before out beautiful life would slip away. At least for now. I think somehow it's still there and when I die I will able to go back there with you anytime, even for ever. 

But today, I stopped the player. I want those dates to remain as they are. I found the album on YouTube and listened there instead. I want those dates on my old computer to stay as they are. With our beautiful life awaiting our return together. 

Maybe you are there even now, making things ready for me to join you. I can't wait. I know I must but it's hard. Someday soon, my love, take me. Bring me home to you. With all my love forever. 

A Rememberance

Little sweetheart, Leonard Cohen passed away last night. I remember how much you liked him. And I'm remembering something about all that this morning...

In April of 2009, just before my birthday, you told me you had tickets for something special. I already knew you were taking me to see DCfC in Sacramento on the second day after and that we were going to decamp to Davis for nearly a week on our own - heaven!

But this was something else. You had tickets to see Leonard Cohen at the beautifully restored Paramount Theatre in Oakland.

We had great seats just a few rows back in the orchestra. Cohen came out, immaculate as ever, with a great band and proceeded to play a breathtaking 90 minute set. We were thrilled. After the last number he said, "we're going to take a little break and then be back". Incredibly, this was only the first of two sets. About 20 minutes later, he returned. Before they began playing, he thanked everyone and then told us that he'd had the great honor of having his Buddhist teacher with him backstage tonight and that during the interval they'd had a small drink of some very fine spirits (whiskey, I think) together. He said that his teacher had asked him if he could tell the difference between this and more commonplace ones. Cohen admitted that he couldn't exactly and then told us his teacher looked at him for a moment and said "I've taught you nothing." 

He laughed and so did we. It was an incredibly heady and light and beautiful night. When he came back yet again for the first of several encores, he literally skipped onstage, bounding with the lightness of step of a deer or a teenager. You and I lingered at our seats after, still soaking it all up. 

It was a magic night and if I could say something to him today, I think it might be this:  

"Thank you, Leonard. I suspect you have many people to greet today - perhaps altering your own lyrics to say "hello" instead of "so long" to your own great love Marianne - but when you have a moment, please give my angel a little kiss for me, won't you? See you both soon."

And thank you, my little sweetheart. You make everything better. And I love you forever with all my heart and soul.

Our Music

Little sweetheart, the new Radiohead record is coming out on Sunday. I've heard the first two tracks and the second of them especially is very good. It was one of the first things we discovered we both liked, wasn't it, my darling. And they were from Oxford, where you went to school. Even came into the pub one time you told me, and you didn't recognize them and asked someone. "hey, what's their deal?". Ha! Remember how "In Rainbows" had just come out when we first met? That seemed to be a thing - albums that came out by bands we liked and in a few years and it seemed it was time for the next album. 2011 was like that. It seemed time for a new Low album and a new DCfC album. And a new Radiohead album. And "King of Limbs" came out like that, in those last weeks while you and I were in rehearsals in 2011 - how I first heard about it and texted you and downloaded it while you were driving home and we listened to it together. It was so beautiful and epic and sad and came to be very much associated with that time, then, of your tragic passing, because I had it on in the car driving everywhere, doing everything, aching for you. You once told me - I remember this so clearly, we were driving on Judah on our way to Adronico's, listening to "Narrow Stairs" - you were talking about what should be played at your funereal and that you wanted me to speak (you were so unafraid to talk about these kind of things) and I said that I could never listen to our music again if you were to die before me. And you reached over smiling and held my hand and told me to listen and to remember you. And I cried and cried and cried. And tried to keep driving. And you were right there at my side holding my hand in yours and there was no need to cry yet. Not really. I miss you so. I'll try to listen to this all this weekend when it comes out, my little sweetheart. And if it's true that records come out when they're supposed to, that they mark some kind of invisible demarcation line in our life and times, I'll hope, I'll be praying, that it means I'm only getting ever closer to you and that day when we will be reunited, never to ever part again. With all my love, Summer. With all my love forever.

Our Oneness Can Never Be Erased

Little sweetheart, some time ago I had a dream - I was with you, we were together and happy and fine and hand in hand and I had a tattoo that said "our oneness can never be erased." I'm not so good at remembering my dreams but this one was still with me when I woke. A few hours later, all suited up and about to go for a run, it suddenly hit me again. "The dream!", I exclaimed to myself. I grabbed a pen and the closest piece of paper I could find (I still have it, it's tacked up over my desk) and wrote down those words, those ethereal, not at all ordinary or conversational words. It felt so much like a direct message from you from The Forever. And I've been writing those words on the inside of my left forearm with a Sharpie every day since then.

Well, today, my little sweetheart, I had them tattooed in your own handwriting on my arm. The nice girl, Michelle, who was my tattoo artist, traced some of your writing from the beautiful Christmas card you gave me our first year together and today she did the work. When she finished it was beautiful and she said so. She said that very thing and "now, it's forever".

Indeed. You are forever, my little sweetheart. And I want so to join you there. Until that day! Today, tho', I have your writing - the message that you sent to comfort and give me faith - etched into my flesh to keep you with me.

And as I headed out back into the bright, cold day this afternoon, I listened to some of our music, just as you told me to. I haven't been able to before, it's just hurt too much. But today I listened to DCFC's "Transatlanticism", with its repeated, insistence chorus - I need you so much closer and I cried and cried but knew you were near. Nearer than I can imagine.

And right now I'm listening to your beloved Goldfrapp from the CDR of "Felt Mountain" you made for and gave me when we were in Boston exactly this time just after your birthday in 2008. It's just the kind of CDR that you would make - the tracks in the order you best like them, not necessarily in the album's original sequence and on this one the title track appears three different times over the course of it and it ends with four songs from another Goldfrapp album, most notable for "Black Cherry", which just about breaks me in two, it is so very much the personification of you, my little sweetheart.

I love you, Summer. And I feel so grateful and close to you tonight....