Postcard from a grief

Hey bro -- my baby twin -- long time no speak to you here. Sorry! It's not that I don't remember you any more; not a day passes where I fail to sense you walking near me, or us together. Whether such images are bubbles up from memory or simply the permanence of your presence in my heart I can't say for sure. Would it matter?

I listened to a few of your favorite music tracks on iTunes here at work today an wanted to write you a note. Are you out there on those waters of still, heavenly blue, dipping the paddle of your little boat, voyaging on towards oblivion as our time marches the other way?

I miss you, God I miss you. What would you be up to now, if you were still alive? Marriage? Travels? Taking ever more beautiful images, healing us that much more? Would we have had many more emails, lamenting this or that, looking for jobs, having a laugh? Would we have walked and talked again, become closer brothers, faster friends, aging into a warm communion where the distances cease counting?

Well, who knows. We have what we have of you, there in the battered box of our memories, amid the tokens and toys and spare change you left behind. Your sandals next to the couch in your apartment, indented with your soles. Your guitar parked next to the bedroom door. A fridge half-full of aging organic food. The elaborate fabric hanging on the wall that you brought back from Bolivia. Your AA literature tucked among classics and pulp novels on a bookshelf. Closets cluttered with all the clothes you've ever owned. Boxes of slides. Envelopes stuffed with receipts. Size 13 snowshoes like tennis rackets. A pack stuffed with camera and external hard drive and a legal pad filled with notes for your job in that terrible scrawl you and I share. A few journals. A mountain bike. Piles of CDs, books on Photoshop technique, a few albums of photographs. That big bed that almost filled the bedroom. All of that life in mid-stride ...

... All of it still there though it's all gone, disbursed among family heirs and friends, donated, emptied. Gone yet it's all here, your perpetual apartment, from which you are forever now free to head out from into the wild, camera in one hand, love in the other, your blue eyes expectant and joyous. Free.

What's the essential track here? "Pavane for a Dead Prince" ....

Every year you become my younger twin; seven years now separate us; I become your older and older yet brother. One day the distance will settle itself and we'll be separated by a fixed number of years again, free to walk those blue wilds together. For now, this postcard from the living, in loving remembrance of the dead ...

Miss you, Timm.