Salisbury.Fake Uncategorized

Dear Robbie

Your birthday is Monday. And so another year has passed without you here. It went quickly this time. Most days appear to be happening faster than I think I like.

Some days are better than others. Where I can see a sunrise and not be disappointed one of my best friends isn’t there to see it. Where opening my mouth to inhale doesn’t hurt because you aren’t able to do the same.

If I had loved you more. If I had loved you better. Would that have made a difference? Probably not. I know what it’s like to be chained to the whirlpool of thoughts dragging a person to the bottom. I know there’s very little, if anything, that looks like hope. That looks like something to hold onto with every bit of strength left.

I love so hard. I put everything I have in me into making sure people know that they matter. I give all of myself and usually get very little in return, but I do it because to lose someone else, to break open with every thought of them–good or bad–I don’t have it in me.

My beautiful boy. You will never be 35.

I tell myself to keep plodding through the different paths my life will take me. I do it for the little girl I never got to be. I do it for her.

Myself.

All this time I thought I was doing it for everyone else. Because I had to stay strong, be strong for them. Be the one people could rely on even when I was broken and battered by the hurricanes of my mental illness.

To say I miss you is to be cheap with words and you deserve more. I hope the sun shines on your face now, and that the pain you felt while here is more a memory almost forgotten.

You will never be forgotten, my sweetest friend.

Salisbury.Fake Life, Uncategorized

Acceptance

A small backstory for this is I lost a friend of mine a few years ago when he took his own life. For the longest time it crushed me because I was worried I didn’t do enough to help him, to keep him. His birthday is today, and in the past I’d become a useless mess because I didn’t want to face the overwhelming sadness. I miss him most especially today. The piece below is something I wrote last year for him. There’s sadness today, but also joy because I got to know him even if it was for a short time.

Acceptance

It takes a lot of effort sometimes to remember the good moments when you’ve lost someone really close. Sometimes the grief is more than a wave. It’s a vacuum and you can’t feel anything but the pressure of that loss, the pressure of the absence of the person you loved. They can’t make jokes about how innocent you were. They can’t send you twenty-five YouTube videos of their favorite metal songs for you to wake up to. They can’t stay up until all hours of the night just because they love the sound of your voice.

You romanticize these moments. Look back on them with a fondness you never felt while they were here. Because they were here. You didn’t need to remember them fondly yet. You could keep talking even though your throat was sore and the birds were chirping and oh shit, man, I gotta work in four hours. I’ll talk to you later.

You gave so much of your love without knowing you had and now there’s nowhere to put it. So it bubbles over and leaves you with a displaced mess of smiles for boys with an Irish lilt to their voice, for those friends of yours now who ask if you want to talk about history, or go into why you’re slacking on your writing. You no longer hear that beautiful voice, but you remember the way it filled your heart with a hello, hey, I missed you.

It’ll be all right, you tell yourself. And it is. It’s absolutely okay. But sometimes it’s okay to miss them and accept you’re still sad about it.

written july 27, 2020

I watched Bo Burnham’s “Inside” last night and it’s kind of stuck with me in a big way. It rendered me speechless, but it was 2 A.M. and I was lost in remembering Robbie, lost in the sound and art of “Inside,” lost in wanting to just create forever. The world can often feel too large and yet still too close all at once and it’s so easy to get stuck in a loop of existing. Letting the world slide over you while you try to come back to what you’ve worked so hard to become. It ends up feeling like nothing.

But there’s a moment. A last ditch effort, that sniff of “not yet, I can’t give up yet,” and it propels you forward for a moment and lets you feel real. Like you’re invincible and everything is yours.

On my drive home at the end of summer, when the days start getting shorter, and the sun hangs lower in the sky at 7 p.m. The gold covers the earth and for a half hour I am okay. I see the world as I love to, without the filter of what keeps me up at night. It is striking and stunning and it is mine. That is the world I exist in with Robbie. With Henry. With all the ones I love. It’s the rush of air coming in through my windows, in the breath of sweet grass baked in the sun all day. I am the realest I’ll ever be and it is enough.