Notes to You, Long Gone.

You drove from New Haven to Cambridge that last 4th of July to surprise me. Despite the prognosis. Despite the gentle scolding by everyone we knew for you to “rest”. We walked along the Charles from my place on Ash St. all the way to The Esplanade.

Hundreds of thousands of people were out that day, and what I remember is the sweet hush of that madness. How it was only we two. Walking, talking about the future as if it could exist exactly as planned. As if we could conjure it.

At the Shell, we were made quiet by the irony of fireworks. Our little sparkler hearts fizzing and popping in our chests.

We must have walked until 4 or 5 am. Talking and planning, making our lives a BigBig Dream. We walked and walked and walked. Beyond the departing, drunken, happy, free crowds. Past the straggler teens hovering in the park. Over the bridge in its stonework dress. We walked in to the dark morning, together.

How ironic as we walked in Boston on that Independence Day that it would take years for me to find peace without you, to understand that my memory of you and the Revised Dream of an Unknowable Future could fully coexist. Perhaps it was survivor’s guilt of a sort. We stood on the edge of the giant precipice of the world, and only I could jump.

Odd, how interchangeable leaving-someone-behind and being-left-behind feels.

And I’m grateful for this bit of you, left behind for me. But today I am thankful that I am no longer captive to the BigBig Dream of You. How happy you would be at my readiness, after so long, to attach myself to something new, some big life moving, even as I write, towards me.

I still miss you. And I am hopeful, excited for epic.

Finally, those things live together.

Happy 4th.