Dear Gabriel,
I think it’s time to hop the train to Crazy Town for a while.
I have come to a point where I don’t know what I want, something unusual and frightening for me, the girl who always knows what she wants. I feel like Jack Sparrow the captain from Pirates of the Caribbean, staring at his magic compass as it spins aimlessly. I don’t know that I’ve ever been here before. When have I ever been directionless?
So, away. To Crazy Town, the place where time is wonky, where north and south have no meaning, where up is down and sideways is backwards and dreaming is the real reality. I wish I didn’t feel so insane in this place, especially since I have a hunch that it’s the most lucid I ever get during my time on this planet.
I don’t know that I’ll be writing letters while I’m gone. Maybe, maybe not. But not certainly; not much is certain anymore. It’s a liminal period, “bardo” as Buddhism calls it, the space of emptiness between life and death that I’m moving towards, and I don’t know where you fit. So. My letters may end. They may change. They may continue. I don’t know. Anything. All bets are off on the best day of my life.
The idea is to free myself from the strings I’ve got attached to things that don’t serve me right now. I need to get to the root cause of my rising weight, and that means stripping down spiritually and starting from the very beginning. Whatever that means.
To end this letter with the kind of energy I believe sums up my feelings for you overall, I thought I’d bring in the birthday present note I wrote to you two years ago, along with its accompanying song.
It’s just a note about a memory of mine; my favorite memory of you and me, but it just dawned on me today that the reason this memory is my favorite is because it’s the first time I saw You behind you. I recognized you before I realized I recognized you, and I’ve always considered that moment special. Less than a month after we met. Before your accident. Before my metaphysical journey. Before anything.
______
9/21/10
Gabriel,
For your birthday present, I’d like to share what it is that I love most about you. It can be illustrated by the following account of my favorite memory of you and I:
.…….
Picture an afternoon in late June, early July, the sun warm but not sweltering yet, with the two of us walking down a quiet lane, chatting. We reach a tree at the end of the block and lay in its shade on our backs, looking at the leaves and the sky, conversing the mysteries of God. I roll over onto my stomach. You follow suit.
And then…
…you pick a blade of grass…
…hold it between both hands to your mouth…
…and make a whistle.
At that moment, I am transported to my childhood, watching my father with wide, enchanted eyes as he makes his own grass whistle. I never learned how to do that, and the wonder I felt as a child revisits me then as an adult. Lying next to you, remembering the magical pleasures of my youth, I can’t help but smile at the thought of my own son, his eyes like saucers, marveling at his first view of the simple instrument, and ask myself who it is that will teach him how to make his own? I can picture his toothy grin, taking up all of his face, when he finally manages to produce a sound from the blade, presumably after extensive puffing.
……….
I don’t know how else to describe what I love most about you except to say that you somehow carry the innocence of childhood within you. The grass whistle, the flux capacitor and rocket jets for your car, the model airplanes, the cats you teach to fetch, the daring mountain bike adventures, the radio built from spare electronics… these are all dreams from our earlier years. Most of us relinquish them eventually, but they are alive in you.
Tell me, dear friend, what sort of person do our dreams entrust themselves with? It takes a rare soul, indeed, with an understanding of their sacredness, purity, and vital importance, to ensure their safety – for dreams are fragile things – often broken, bruised, mocked, and cast aside as meaningless wastes of time. They must be handled with the utmost care, gentleness – and steadily receive nourishment in the form of hope, compassion, and genius – to survive.
Keep them carefully protected, Gabriel. If not for you, then for the rest of us. We need our dreams – and we are lost without our most precious and vigilant Dreamkeepers.
Happy Birthday.
______
If I write nothing else, if the strings I’ve got attached to you fall away in Crazy Town, please take this note and leave the rest. If there was one way I could choose to be remembered, it would be in the moment I saw You for the first time.
Yours ever,
Violet
© 2012
