You’ll never get this missive. You’ll never read it. I’ll never send it. If I could, where would I send it? Heaven? Two reasons that would be folly: I don’t know if you made it there….secondly, the address is too general.
You were a Godly man in your own way, but I can’t imagine “Heaven” being anything a scholar like you would have envisioned.
And then again, maybe it IS all that–gilded with fluffy marshmallow-like clouds and Charleston Heston lookin’ mother fellas perched in repose. You know, everything you wanted, but nothing you expected.
I have several confessions to make here. Read well, this won’t happen again.
I wept after learning you had died, then I cried for other reasons when I learned how you died, four days later. Your heart, the detective intimated, exploded. It “was a mess in there” he quoted the Medical Examiner as saying. You ate eggs snd hard salami and all the things that would assail the healthiest of hearts. You typed and as far as I can tell that was your only exercise. Did you want to die? No, but I don’t think you were too terribly keen on living. It had been years since I’d seen you, but you were grossly unhealthy from what I was told. Having been a reporter and seen other cases of a person’s nonchalance to life, I can imagine what you looked like, outwardly and inwardly…..your emotions and how simple, yet how complex and gnarled they were.
I’m hard pressed to pursuit additional facts about your death, much less facts about your life. I know you were deceptive, not so much regarding who you were, but how you lived. I was always 95 percent sure your existence was a massive lie based on a a few tin truths you replayed like an old 45 rpm. You weren’t a very persuasive liar. You were brilliant at being closed, impatient and selfish. You were so fucking removed from things that would have mattered to emotionally healthy prople. In retrospect, I resent your ignorance, your lack of finesse. I’ll be honest, your life was like every hsckneyed Cher re-recording made since 1972.
But if Im actually playing the home-game confessional and at this stage of my grief, is all that matters. Here goes: at one time, you probably, maybe, loved me as much as you could. But even that was so limited. You would never allow anyone to love you in return. You would loathe the responsibility. You were emotionally lazy. I don’t understand that. But I think, I was also on an unhealthy road to learning how that process worked. People might think me unkind for saying these things to you. Including this: I would never be free of you any other way. It seems like a heartless thing to say,yet so correct.
I marvel at how you disliked me the most when I was at my most human and vulnerable. How you seemed to care more me when I was cold and har. I could tell when that veneer of yours was phased, but it never happened that often and rarely was Inever the one to scratch the surface.
Those who know and few did, might say the last ten ten years were a complete waste of my time. I don’t see it that way and not for the lack of analysis. You weren’t a waste of time, nor were “we”. I benefitted from your cruelty. It’s was the kind of cruelty only you could dispense, the only kind from which I could learn. Gratitude is half the battle in the war which is waged in the name of late and hate.
I’m not allowing myself to be overly consumed by your dishonesty, perceived or otherwise. I don’t know why, but I won’t allow it. Maybe it’s because I won’t be duped again. Maybe it’s because I’ve wizened up and will live better, longer because you lived your’s so horribly wrong. You were exemplary to me for the best and worst reasons. You’re gone. True, I hate,the way God said “enough” to you, but I don’t suppose there’s ever a stunning way to exit this mortal coil.
Ask Lupe Velez.
But but no one should die quite as alone as you were. Someone tried to tell me ‘at least it wasn’t at the hand of some murderer”
My response was to ask this person to explain how it was any different. Your roll in your own death is staggering. But I’ll say this much: it pains me to realize that your death went as as unnoticed as your life. I laugh now when I think you always responded to many of my more uncomfortable queries with “no one cares”. That was your pat comedic response or do you though. Ot do ai thought.
This is the last private thing I’ll ever say to you publicly—this came to me in a semi-lucid dream last night. I was wrapped In a blanket under the covers of the bed of my guest room of all places. I can’t for the life of me understand how or why I went to s room I rarely go in during my waking state. Then again, I’ve been doing and thinking s lot of dust from things. But I was there and I remember this from my dream. Even though I was in a strange bed, I felt so warm and secure like a baby bird in the nest in the tree outside my front door. I felt as though I had one purpose: to stay there and let nature and nurture employ their will. My fate was simple and explicit–I was to become full grown, mature, able to to leave the nest and have options, all of them positive, if I so choose.
And that’s what I choose. I choose to live, like I need to believe you would have wanted.
Feathers, my friend. Feathers. That’s how I’ve decided I’ll know you’re here and there and all around me, at good times, during bad times when I feel too small, when I feel too huge. Despite your absence in my life, I expect to receive enough feathers to outfit a nice-sized flock before my venture here ends.
So, fly fly…..fly away, efwm; I’ll be magnanimous and urge you to soar on air that only yields to the most special wings. Even yours.
And someday, I’ll fly away home, as well.
Until then.
