and taxes

this one goes out to everyone who gets up each day despite the fact that even the things we believe we cannot live without, will be gone someday too. i just turned 34, which i have to say is not a particularly interesting number. 33 had a visual, if not numerical appeal.  35  has a bit more echo in that it rests middling both ends of a decidedly arc-like decade in one's life.

so far 34 has been kind of quiet. and despite the fact that in certain light the sides of my eyes have become more delicate and fold neatly into smiles and sunlight, i still feel everything. but mostly i am trying to be grateful that i saw the sunset four out of seven times this week.

last week when i was still 33 all i knew is that i was overwhelmed. our friend timmy died suddenly at 35 and it quickly reshaped the world around us. life felt both complicated and silly all at once. again, i could no more stop thinking about the science of simultaneity than slow it down. timmy left behind a veiled simplicity we have been trying to sort through. as we rush at keeping him close while also letting him go, each day goes further into the heliotrope, shipwrecked at best; the shore, the tide, all happening no matter what.

in the interest of full disclosure i haven't been able to write (at all) because i haven't known what words to use. the stories have been poured out, leased into the shadows, our memories scrambling to find shelter in something no longer there. i started a hundred lines that reached out past me, tangled, only to discover that there was no way to untie this knot.

i have known timmy since i was 14. i could give you a hundred versions of our friendship. most recently, however, he played maestro.

dear timmy, i have to thank you for one of the most important gestures ever extended my way. for years you and i were desperate to find fonso again. you were the only other person i knew that shared in that pursuit with the same sense of urgency and need. we went scouring for him in the limited ways we could and each time one of us got closer, it was a shared triumph. this is voluminous and gigantic, like you, and all that is propped up adjacent. i am wide-eyed, blinded, and like a child in how all this here in the losing, can only be measured against what gets left in the gaining.

and then you were none. this was the unexpected part of each life that happens no matter what. when sitting across from you i wondered what was more fragile; your interior or exterior? that beautiful part of sky everyday that leaves us into the dark, where we feel more, but can see less. i will write this because i am a writer and the world at best, to me, is a series of words unpacked into moments that pass so fast. and still, in your wake, i cannot place all this orphaned language. because you were as funny as you were difficult, as present as you were missing, generous as you were needy, awake as you were asleep, frustrating as you were lovable, clean as you were sick, sensitive as you were dangerous, and tennis as you were vodka. we will carry it all, keeping every contradiction and lit up warmth shining through the entire prism we found looking back at us, in the shrine you've left us in.

in loving memory of timmy k. rest in peace.