OH BROTHER


I still think about you a lot.

I think, I imagine, how differently things would be if you were still with us. Sometimes it still pains my heart when I want so much to be where it used to be the five of us but it's become such a place in the past that simply wanting it won't take me back there. There was something I read somewhere, a phrase about the importance of brick walls. I'm not even sure why I'm mentioning that now, except that it feels so much like facing a brick wall, this wanting to have you back, it's a hoohah effort to knock it down and I want to knock it down and yet in a small part of my mind I know the brick wall has to be there because like they always say, it has a purpose.

You know, it really sucks that you didn't give me some last words, some last something. Not that it would have changed anything but what the heck, I needed it to keep going. Would have been great if you just said you were okay, although, of course you weren't okay cause if you were, you wouldn't be dead. I just mean that you know... that it was okay, that it was the better choice and that you would be better off. I guess I can assume that now but I will never really know will I. Now it's just a better thought, something that works for me. At any rate, it still would just be about me and that way it doesn't work cause I want it so much to be about you.

Nothing much has changed out here, it's still a frenzy, the way living is, always has been. I imagine you looking down on us with an amused smile on your face, thinking if only we knew how unimportant all of these were and how much nicer it would be afterwards, we'd probably give it a rest. Well, maybe life was wired to be this way cause if it was all so restful and time-defiant and you know, heaven-like, then we wouldn't know the difference and we wouldn't have something to work for. Maybe we were wired not to know cause if we did, we wouldn't know how to care. Sometimes, I give myself a moment for a little indulgent question, of why it had to be you up there, of why you couldn't have gone on like the rest of us and stuck it out here. Of course I have no answers. Who'd I ask in the first place?

Well, maybe this wasn't what was meant for you, nothing of the frenzy, none of it. Yours is special. Yours is to be still.

And free.