Of COURSE there was fog that night. You wouldn't have it any other way. It wasn't just any fog, though. It was warm-cool fog that makes every word visible. In this case, every sigh, every "no, no, no, no" denial, every chest hitch. It was the gauzy fog that dilutes the streetlamps into fuzzy orbs (I have to believe that you were in every glow that bunched and eventually blended until my tears and the speed of the car blurred them indistinctly). It was the kind of weather that comes pushing Autumn ahead of it and dragging Winter behind, only this time, anachronistically appearing in December. This kind of fog usually found you outside a bar with your friends, rendering laughter visible instead of sighs. Smoking your Parliaments and sipping a cocktail as loud music and more steam curled its way under back doors and around cars. Now, it serves only to punctuate the hollowness in the air without your breath. How am I...how are WE supposed to do this? That question, answerable only by you, would play on an endless loop as the car hurtled through the fog seemingly on its own, carrying in it this unwilling and contracted heart.
Buzzed in by the night doorman, past the kitchenette that universally smells of stale creamed corn, across the micro-patterned carpet, and through the gauntlet of pale, crumpled family, I stood at the door...your door...the door. I wouldn't go in, I told myself. I couldn't bear the thought that your beautiful face would be drained of color. People always said, "they look so peaceful; they look like they're just sleeping". I thought of every sleepover we had, always the result of talking, music-ing, and story-ing until one of us would simply trail off and fall silent...it was always you, and I don't want to remember you "looking like {you're} just sleeping". I want to remember you actually sleeping, murmuring because even in sleep, you couldn't be totally silent. I want to remember your first action upon waking to be looking around the room for me and smiling at me (the second action, of course, being to fix your hair). I have so many memories that will be better than a numbing image of permanent sleep, but those are for you and for me. You wrote about them in your poems to me. I'll read them until they are dust. The words are engraved in me like fault lines.
So how are we supposed to do this? Your friends, your family (hell, all your friends are family to you; that's how you made them feel), me? How? Ironically, the one person who would be perfect to bleed this sadness from our wounds is you. We will do what we did as we said goodbye to you--we will hug, we will cry, we will laugh, we will inhale and exhale steadily. We will be okay because loving you taught us to love each other, and your love for us allowed us to feel perfect for just a minute because, for just a minute, reflected on your face, we were perfect.
Stealing a line from the poem you wrote for me (which your sister read gracefully tonight)
"I bid you adieu,
but only for now
for soon, very soon
I will come and find you."
I love you, and I will miss you, my sweet, perfect, beautiful friend.
