Christmas Morning

Good morning, little sweetheart! Happy Christmas!

I’m kinda just taking it easy today, writing a little and recording a couple of basic tracks and thinking of earlier years when I was with you or my mom or later, with your folks.

Even though today is kinda lonely, Sylvia will be here day after tomorrow and we’ll have a little Christmas of our own, then, and the following week, head out to see your folks and have a second with them, too.

Today, I’m remembering especially our first Christmas, little sweetheart, when you gave the beautiful scarf you knitted while doing the play up in Boston and the breathtaking Christmas letter you included with it - part of which is now tattooed on my right arm.

Christmas is such a good day to remember all the things you taught me about love and all that really matters.

Merry Merry Christmas, my angel. Thinking of you with love and forever.

In These Days

Little sweetheart, I am missing you so keenly in this moment. Things have been busy of late and while that's good, I also need those moments everyday when I can quiet myself and call to you.

I hadn't been up to that little church for the candlelight service they have on Wednesdays for a while. But I went last night and sang and prayed and lit a candle for you, my love.

This is the time, these weeks, that begin to feel so heavy in my heart each year, little sweetheart, because they were our last together. It can feel the weight of your loss closing in on me and I need to quiet myself and call to you and listen for you and strengthen my faith to know you are safely in the care of the eternal and that I will be with you in the blink of an eye. But it's hard.

Help me to know, Summer. Help me please to do your will, little sweetheart. No one knows better than you. Help me do, help me be what you want, what you mean to show me. I miss you, my little sweetheart. Help me quiet myself and know that you are near - closer than I can imagine - and just to trust and love you and know.

Perhaps I need only to look at my arms where your words, in your own handwriting are with me always. The right arm: "I love you. Your Gingersnap, Summer." The left: "Our Oneness Can Never Be Erased."

All my love. Forever, Forever.

At Christmas

Little sweetheart, it's Christmas Day and it is much like you once described it here - your Dad reading aloud shocking political news, your Mom wrangling dogs and kittens with great and tender care and me... missing you.

Please be near me today, won't you, my little sweetheart? Let me know you are closer than I can readily imagine. Please help and guide me. Please help me to be a good boy and to do things that please and make you proud of me. I am so very grateful for you, my gorgeous, miracle girl. Please help me be the better person, the better man, that you were so effortless and generously molding me to become by the shining power of your presence.

My heart so aches and longs for you today and every day, my little sweetheart. Please take me to you soon. And know that I love with all my heart and soul forever. As you whispered to me in dreams to quiet and comfort me and as it is written on my flesh in your own handwriting - Our Oneness Can Never Be Erased.

Happy Christmas, Summer.

Our Oneness

Little sweetheart, below is a triptych of the tattoo you whispered to me in a dream: Our Oneness Can Never Be Erased. Saved's Michelle Tarantelli did this work for me one year ago in your own handwriting. The photo is one that Ground Control Magazine's Daryl Darko Barnett took for last January's profile about the band. And I'm writing about it here because our story appears today in Tre Miller-Rodriguez's article as part of a series on the Modern Loss blog. Love you forever.

Be True

I was having a bad day, little sweetheart. I made myself go for a walk all the way up the Met but I couldn't even enjoy it. I barely experienced it. It just made me feel even worse and more lonely. And I was almost back home, thinking how I just don't know what to do, when I saw two women with carry-on luggage, the kind with rollers, talking to two girls on the sidewalk on 10th Avenue. Like behind Lincoln Center. Not anywhere you'd be with luggage. They looked lost. So, I asked if I could help. They wanted to be at Columbus Circle they said. So, I told them they needed to go south and east. Then they showed me a crumpled piece of paper that had their hotel reservation on it. They needed to be on W63rd st. No wonder they were lost - there is no W63rd Street once you get that far west because Lincoln Center takes up about four of those blocks. I told them all that and that they just needed to go up two more blocks to W65th, make a right and then another right on Broadway to find W63th Street. I also told them once they did get checked-in, that Lincoln Center was a great place to go. I was kind of pointing through all this, giving them directions, and the other two girls, who had on some kind of name tags like they worked for a ministry or something noticed the tattoo on my arm, little sweetheart, and they asked me what it said. And I told them about you, and about the dream and everything. They got very quiet and kind. I didn't mean to make them sad. Indeed, I was glad they asked. I love talking about you. I brightened and then I said “God bless you. All of you.” And I told them to have fun in New York. Just moments earlier I was thinking that there is nothing left of my life that I want. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. That when I even try, it just makes me so sad I want to die. And I do, I do just want to pass from this life and fly to be with you wherever you are. But in these moments, when I help someone, when someone asks me something that leads me to tell them of you, I feel better. And I know that what’s left to do is just to be true, be true to you. Carry on the work. Say quiet prayers. Try to help people when I can. Be true. That phrase just seems so resonant, so important. I wrote it down last night and it’s sitting here on my desk as I write this. Life can never be what it was. How could it? It’s a smaller thing now. I need to respect that. Need to quiet myself. And be true. 

January

Today is January 19th, my little sweetheart. Over the course of six days in January are two rather bitter anniversaries for me.

On January 13th, 1991 (when I was just kid, I now know), my father passed away suddenly of a heart attack. His wife found him on the sofa. He'd come downstairs early that morning, made coffee and died watching the news without her being there to wake and help him.

And on January 19th, 2007, my friend and theatre mentor, Curt Dempster, passed away. He, too, was found - by the superintendent of his apartment building. It was a secret (not a very well-kept one) for sometime, but I think it's allowable now to say that, sadly, he took his own life.

The loss of these two men - one, something of a father figure and the other, my actual father (who I feel I never really got to know as a man) - are something that I carried with me and that you deeply understood when I first met you.

You did your best to heal me, my little sweetheart. Your extraordinary kindness and hyper-vigilant love wrapped me in a blanket of protection. You, my darling girl, are the very reason for which I was born. I know that. I think I knew that very early in our acquaintance, even before I had fallen so deeply in love with you. Something in you resonated deep inside my being, bypassing my brain and shaking me to my core. My soul recognized you. I think that's why I wept every time we parted, even if only for a fortnight, even if knowing I would soon be with you, even if we'd already booked the next flight, made plans for the next adventure.

There is simply no one like you, my little sweetheart. How could there be?! That is as it should be. You, my gorgeous girl, my True One, my beautiful spirit, are the other half of my soul. How I long to fly to you! And I remember, on these cold and bitter January days, just how close our paths were beginning to draw near one and another. How God was bringing them to cross and converge. You understood loss and love more than anyone I have ever known. And what's more, you had more natural empathy, too.

Your love saved me, my little sweetheart. I knew it from the first. And I, like my father and my friend, will cross into The Forever, too. Soon, I hope, my love. And I will again know your kindness. I will know your touch. I will know our love, which can never perish. And I - we - will be one again.

As you told me, as you comforted me in my dreams with the message that I now wear so proudly tattooed upon my inside forearm to remind me always - Our Oneness Can Never Be Erased.

I love you, Summer. With all my heart and soul I do. Until that Day! Until that day!

With love & faith,

Michael

Companion Piece

Little sweetheart, this morning I went back to that nice girl at Saved in Brooklyn and got a second tattoo. This one is on my right arm, again, in your handwriting. It's taken from your beautiful Christmas message to me. It's the benediction, which reads: I love you. Your Gingersnap, Summer . Here's a picture, just an hour or so old. Love you forever.

With Love and Fresh Resolve...

I'm flying out of JFK in a few hours, my little sweetheart, to be in NorCal this weekend for your Dad's birthday. He will be 70 on Sunday, my love, and your mom is throwing him a surprise party. After arriving late tonight, I'm going to pick up a rental car and drive down to "hide out" at the house in Davis until the day. As ever, you are so very much on my mind, my darling. I'm looking at my new tattoo - the words you sent to me in a dream from The Forever, where you are, to comfort me and give me faith. It's healing nicely and is beautiful in your own handwriting. It's there always now to remind me how lucky I am to have been found and loved by you. It's there to remind me to be a good boy, to try harder, to do what's right, to be vigilant and mindful. Your writing, your beautiful ethereally-sent message is finally made manifest upon my flesh. I had vowed that it would be and now, finally, it is. That is such a very very good thing, my love. And it also reminds me of the work I have yet to carry out, the other vows and promises I have breathlessly made both to you, my darling, and to myself - to us both.

My dearest Summer. Little sweetheart, I have been meaning and trying and wanting and thinking about writing down everything I can think of about you and about you and I, about our time together and all the things you make me feel, all the things we did and even about now, how I long for you and pray to be with you again and forever. How I strive to understand and have simple, steadfast faith that that day will come, that that will come pass and that I will join you. That anything as extraordinary as you, as your beautiful, vibrant spirit, so central to my very existence, cannot simply vanish. That somehow, all unseen to me now, at some slight remove, you remain in the invisible middle distance I cannot yet perceive with my conscious mortal mind. I’ve wanted to write this and everything and in a way that would honor and, to be perfectly honest, that would conjure you. I’ve kept this blog for a little while that’s an inkling, a notion of this endeavor. A scattershot bit of semi-regular posts every few days, as a beginning, as a way in, as a source, as a starting place to gather thoughts and memories before launching in earnest. But it is that very real, concentrated, earnest effort to tell your story, our story, what I feel I need and must and want to, what I’ve described to others occasionally, for want of a better word, as a memoir - that has not yet commenced. Not really. But I want it to and that’s why I’m writing today, my love. I think, my little sweetheart, that somehow I have been terribly afraid. Afraid that I won’t do it right. That it won’t be enough. Won’t be as good as it should be. Won’t do you the justice that I so wish it will. Afraid it won’t be complete enough. And also, not insignificantly, my little sweetheart, I think I’m simply afraid it will hurt too much. That it will somehow make your absence even more keen, seem so very final, simply break me.

So, my bright angel, my true love, my little gingersnap, will you please help me? May I just try to write to you like this? As if we were emailing or sending each other long letters while apart on some job or commitment that took us away from each other for a period of time? Imagining us just at some remove from each other where we can’t see or Skype or talk on the phone exactly, so we just write and text and tell each other things. Tell each other as much as we can until we get tired or have to go and then pick up again the next day and tell each other more. Would that be okay, my little sweetheart? If I just talk to you like this? Like in a long letter and then another one and then another one and put out of my mind the idea that I have to get everything down all at once or it will be a failure, that I will have failed you, failed us? Is it okay, my sweetheart if we just try it like this? Where I’ll just tell you everything I can think of until I have to stop and then just start again and not worry about it being such an impossible task that I cripple myself before I have even really begun? Can I just talk to you a bit, my darling? Will that be okay? Will you please help me, Summer? May I tell you some things? May I start here?

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....

Coming soon...

In your own handwriting, little sweetheart. In time for your birthday, I'm hoping...