Dear John. or rather, Dear Travis.
today has been a long day. i got a call from an old high school friend this morning letting me know that a close friend of ours was in a serious car accident last night and suffered severe head trauma.a few minutes ago i got the call saying that his parents decided to pull the plug. it's the right thing to do; he was gone anyway. the pressure levels on his brain were such that he was rendered completely brain-dead a few hours after the accident.
i lost touch with him a few years ago, but he was a fairly significant friend in my life...to the point where we had more than one "relationship defining" conversations. I spent the majority of my day remembering...
i wrote a long email to him today. see, we parted ways under slightly rocky conditions and i've always felt a twinge of guilt whenever he crept into my thoughts. today i told him i loved him, i wish i had been a better friend and that i was sorry my apology was the better part of four years in coming.
it's funny...i'm always shocked at the impermanence of life. must it really take a tragedy for me to consider this thing called life? and what was it that made me sit purposefully and have a one sided conversation with an old friend---all the while fully knowing that he would never read it.
today andrea told me that god lets people check their email in heaven. ain't no fire can burn that belief out of my system.
so Trav, i'll just finish where we left off. i mean, if god lets you use the internet, you could probably find my blog. here's what i really want to say. Thanks for that poem. i have it in a box somewhere. also, yes, i agree with you that you can find truth about god in mostly any music (although you probably could have said fuck a few less times. ) but in the long run, i don't think i care that much about what word you used as a filler, since i knew how sensitive your heart was. one more thought: ani difranco says that "a tatoo is no more permanent than i am. and whoever said that life was suffering, i think they had their finger on the pulse of joy..." the thing is, trav, i know life was tough for you. i think it can be safely said that you suffered. but i know your finger (or in your case, a clenched fist) was actually holding on to the right thing. and your tatoo? Jehova is strength? yeah, i think you've trumped ani. that one's a little more permanent. i love you. we'll catch up soon.
3 Comments:
do you feel terribly out of balance? i feel like i'm walking with a limb missing or something. wish you were here to be my other leg. btw - dave and i are going to the funeral on sat@4pm. let me know if you're making the trip down, k?
I really hope we can talk soon. I told you I've been researching Orthodoxy and they believe some really mind-blowing and incredibly hopeful things about death. It's changed my life.
I love you.
Thanks for writing this post. Isn't it something how impermanence always comes as a shock, again and again?
Post a Comment
<< Home