An essay for a friend

Phrases from my younger years have a recent tendency to resurface amidst unresting thoughts. Like stones that have drawn along the ocean floor to be heaved upon isolated shores just as the coast fears it is losing itself against the incessant oscillation of great tides. Words can do that. They convene beneath routine. They travel and they tread vast distances so tremendously endless that the horizon seems an untouchable desire, an eternally taunting temptress. As they tumble below surfaces seeming so rhythmically controlled, they gather. They grow. Until suddenly and uncautiously they leap forth in an opportune moment as if knowing they’re needed, desired, required. Such as pebbles returning to a beach that loyally retreats into the sea with each lapse of wave. These phrases, I find, are often carried in my father's’ voice.

Two years ago I suddenly recalled with vivid insistence the reel of stars against a deep, dark sky that bustled beyond the windshield of his truck and his steady, matter-of-fact tone telling my nine year old self that the worst thing in the world would be to bury one of your children. I can never recall how we arrived on such subjects.

After holding this thought for thirteen years amid my impressionable youth it reared its potent head when I was 22. Someone I knew was dealing with what my father would call the worst thing in the world. It rained relentlessly for weeks. Of course it did. He had been the light.

It took an entire month to regain my footing and the shift in direction was irrevocable. Unanimously. The people gathered, as they do when called to celebrate a life exhausted from or by living. Especially when exhausted from reaching and imprinting and influencing each life to ever align with or cross paths with their own. The word funeral was never used.

Uncontainable in a house or a hall and awry in a church or a temple the people flocked to and filled the Victoria Conservatory of Music. Every seat was taken and every blank space was stood in and the doorways were crowded so onlookers overflowed onto the outside steps and surrounding sidewalks. The air itself was static and trembling as his band mates stood on stage playing songs he had written wearing vibrant colours and expressions as though they were waiting to still hear confirmation of whether the composer would be joining them or not. And he was there. Not just the slideshow of photographs above the box of ashes but in the enduring demeanour on his family’s faces and in the tempo changes his friends played so smoothly even though they seemed elsewhere entirely. And as he always had when in the physical presence of strangers, he initiated introductions. And ideas. The bonds began and eyes were caught across crowds and those who had arrived in a daze left adrift with the exhale of ease. Because he had that effect. Illuminating not only spaces he entered and places he ventured but the muddled and mislead corners of creation that huddled unfed in timid territory. Where deep seeded and ego elating passions bloomed. I had seen it in his eyes, he had been there himself.

He seemed a seasoned veteran in this always evolving game called life when we met at 18. It was the kind of friendship to apparently pick up where it left off even though we hadn’t known each other beforehand. In this lifetime at least. He wrote songs and I wrote poems but I’d never let them roam from my pages. He found within me a spark that had been overlooked for many moons and willed it to become a flame without me being any the wiser. For the first time in my life I creatively collaborated. He called me daily. Each time from a different telephone, he was already a nomad in his own city and some called him flighty and I only attached this to his giving my words wings. He had this smile. And understanding of music. Understanding of creation, of living, of thriving. Of me, it sometimes seemed. Recognizing only his face in a crowded cafe I began reading poetry out loud. “Slamming”. Perhaps donned such a title as that’s all the crowd hears. My nauseated heart slamming against my chest. I could hardly catch my breath. But his smile was there. And so I read.

It was as if I had been writing in comfortable circles until he, and he alone, removed my training wheels and gave me a violent and exhilarating shove towards the miraculous unknown. And then I left town. And came back. And left town. And came back. And left town. And came back. Playing hopscotch around the west coast while aloof and impatient acquaintances fell from my life like accumulated dust beaten from a beautiful rug, but he had become a thread woven among the pattern. He revelled in my restlessness always inquiring which words were in the works, which stanzas needed structure, which rhymes required rhythm. And then he left town. And didn’t come back. Won’t come back. Can’t come back. I’m unsure if it’s ironic or horrific that after a lifetime of igniting fires with such passion and power within so many beings that he then died of smoke asphyxiation. He was 22. I was 22. A lot of us were 22, or thereabouts. In your 20s the only thing more foreign than death is love. You know of both as they claim the lives of your elders, separately or simultaneously, and it’s only through the entangled and traumatic grapevine that you hear of these ominous happenings bearing fruit within your peers. For me the latter remains still an unspeakable language, while the former has become somewhat of a companion. The way one’s parents can become companions only after one emerges beyond years of ignorant elusion and ostensive blame. I have learned much. The commencing of his life initiated a year of miraculous change. And growth. Not just for me, but for the many impacted and indebted souls who gathered in remembrance that February afternoon. It is not, and will never be, worth the price that was paid. But now that some time has passed and we’ve accepted that it will only ever continue to do so, I believe we have done a decent job of maneuvering out of the darkness. This is what solidified my knowing that he had been the light. We were guided. - written for my Creative Writing class at Camosun College -