I Will Carry You With Me
Because I don’t have a choice
Mik Everett wrote, “If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die.” May my love and self-love immortalize us both.
It’s times like these I consider the ever-growing graveyard around me. Or maybe it’s an anthology. Or a garden.
I don’t like the Fourth of July because it’s the loudest day of the year and I spend it thinking about your eternal silence and your memory reverberating with beauty and wisdom to infinity.
Confess your greatest fears and deepest sorrows and, like the end of Mean Girls, fall backwards into my sea of benevolent arms. I don’t care that you don’t even go here.
My sister wrote me a thank-you note, unprompted. On the outside, it quoted William Arthur Ward: “Feeling gratitude without expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.”
Another friend told me: “Someday you’ll stop feeling sorry for what you lost and start feeling thankful for what you had.”
Maybe the difference between life and death is the difference between “I’ll Cover You” and “I’ll Cover You (Reprise).”
I don’t need a crystal ball; I already know the future. It’s that my greatest joy and my greatest sorrow are still ahead. What now?
