In Memory (Retroactive Goodbyes)

Morning Thoughts #142

For AE

How little we tend to mourn each small loss, saving them up until the time of an accumulated end. For instance: I will never go to school again, never come home at the end of the school day, safe in guarded routines - the seemingly life-and-death backyard games of a storied sibling rivalry. Thinking back is like hiking through a forest of understated, partially shaded closures. Almost certainly, today’s the last day for something in our lives - but it’s unlikely we will know what that is until a later date - when we must be content to appreciate it from an unbridgeable distance.

Reflecting on a friend’s recent passing: How was I to know that small goodbye on the red line train, years ago, would also be the big one, forever stretched out? Who am I to write a remembrance? It seems fitting to do it only abstractly, for I was only a bit player in your life. We lost touch, and I kept in too much touch with the world as it evolved. That may be the only reason I’m still here and you’re not. If you ended up feeling you lost your way and were stuck in a hopeless situation - it was only because you never let yourself get lost from yourself - you knew who you were and stuck to it - 10 years of the world’s ugly morphing that you refused to play along with. I kept too aware of how things have changed and recalibrated my expectations, and despite how it may sound, this is not to my credit. How much more in awe I am of people like you - you shut out the nonsense and didn’t let it interact with your ideals - you kept creating and creating, lost in the abundance of your ever-brimming conceptual chamber. You knew what your contributions were (they were what they always were, be it 2013 or 2024) - but because you only paid attention to important things, when you finally resurfaced to discover a since-polluted scene - you were left wondering with no answers - why had the world stopped listening?

The answer may be as simple as: it didn’t. Rather, our culture has forgotten what it should be listening to. The most beautiful sounds are being drowned out, and your recent passing is more proof of that. You weren’t one to play along with a sugar-coated world; you proclaimed the rhythm of your depths, and they will always be worth listening to. In a world dragged down daily through cheap mass consumption, you were an engine of beautiful production.

I turn on the song “Blue” by the Jayhawks, still grateful to you for introducing it to me all those years ago, hoping you’ve found the peace that you worked so hard to create from scratch.