An open letter to Jacob B. Ferrer
Hi Jake,
Twenty five days ago you asked me, with that glowing slight smile across your face, to hold you as tightly as I ever had. That memory seems at once infinitely distant and immediate, as bright as the present isn’t, as sweet as it is painful. Your loss fills me with a longing nothing can satisfy, like a knife lodged in my stomach that I sometimes tolerate but often leaves me breathless on my knees as I try to make sense out of something inexplicable and leaves me to let those feelings flow through me, like water in a storm flooding and abating and doing it again over and over as I hang on to your memory waiting for the weather to turn but knowing the light of the world after the storm will always be dimmer than it was with you next to me.
You are everywhere, in our music and our projects, our plans and your words on my screen, our pictures and your heart which still sits on my desk scribbled with that ever so hard to read handwriting of yours just as the day you gave it to me: “I am not good but I’m working on it. I love you more than anything. Jacob”. I keep wondering if against everything I’ve ever not believed in you can hear me every time I reply to that when I’m alone…
Another moment comes birthing feelings strong enough to rip my arms off when I try to hold on to them, leaving me to watch them crash through every corner of my brain leaving behind only scattered images of you I had forgotten and my body on the floor, tired and alone. I try to make myself whole again, standing by the shore while staring at the vague horizon in a world where the sun set much too early, and find myself lost and unprepared as I gather little pieces of your jigsaw puzzle while waiting for the inevitable blow of the minute that always follows, ever slightly longer and pregnant with memories.
I kept one of your little plastic stars and put it on my ceiling. Late at night, when I can’t go back to sleep and the storms come, I can see it. Through the darkness it grounds me and shows me a softer kind of thought as I feel closer to you and almost feel your warmth, and in the deafening silence when try to whisper the same three words every night. I turn to your star and imagine my hand flying gently through your hair, drawing heaven on your face in an instant lighting the room on a fire that consumes my fears and worries. Joy.
I Miss You.
I stand at the edge of a world I thought I knew that is rapidly dissolving into a future my heart refuses to accept and my body can barely withstand as my mind fights tooth and nail to sear your image behind my eyes. Time runs both ways but cuts only in one direction. And I feel nothing while sifting through the sands of time as your presence lets itself known into mind, forever now timeless.
People tell me pain will lead to something less sharp. And although I can’t imagine such a future at this moment, it is for you that I try, it is for you that I claw my way into each day, it is for you I am shedding the worst pieces of myself, it is for you that I nurture all the virtues I saw in you, in my life yours will continue.
It’s a new day, and I rise reluctantly to a new set of scars as I battle against life to remember every single aspect of you. Moving forward to this new world, in fact dimmer but by virtue of my eyes adjusting to the brightness of the colors you imprinted on a universe previously dressed in black and white. I love you, more than anything.
