- The Fall
- I’ve Just Seen A Face
- We Know
- You’re Alone
- Love Me
- Something You Admire
- Come and Gone
- Imagine
- The Most Beautiful Woman In the World
The Fall
To be born into the world of sin
Is to be rotting from within
To know life will pass you by
And then you will die
It takes naivety to believe you will win
“Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me”
I’ve Just Seen A Face
I can’t remember meeting you as my mother, but I’m so glad you were the one who brought me into this world.
You speak your mind, you have always been true to your word, you try to see the best in others and you allow yourself to be so beautifully human. In short, you have always been my hero.
We Know
“If wisdom can be said to be anything
Its to smile at whatever the world may bring
And bravery defined
Is not just to be kind
But to laugh, to dance and to sing”
You and Dad taught us to think differently, to dream, to sing, to explore, to be what we didn’t think we could be. To give back, to think of others but to not take shit, to try hard.
I can remember being on the phone with you as you babysat Evelyn and Lila. I think I was in the hospital at the time. Hearing through the crackling of the phone them finding your piano with excitement and asking if they could play.
“Of course, and we have to sing too! For you know when you play the piano you have to sing as well for everyone to hear!”
You, who have never been one to revere any one song, lyric or chord progression; You have not been sucked into the tumultuous noise of social media and music culture as I have. And yet you have always intuitively grasped the simple fact that music is love, and love is worth sharing.
I remember being 18 or 19 and asking you for advice while we ate at that Thai restaurant behind the mall in Dayton. I was unsure my current major was the right path but I was also so unsure of everything. I asked how you knew what you wanted to do.
The words you replied with have echoed in my head ever since. “I just felt this uncontrollable fire deep in my belly to succeed”
And looking at you in that restaurant with the plastic mats and garbled radio playing I looked in your eyes and I felt it too. That there was something gnawing away at me; that through all the static and arbitrary nonsense life could throw at you there was truth worth pursuing, even if you didn’t know true north.
It was the most inspiring night of my life.
“Still the Boss”
You’re Alone
“Look at all the lonely people, where do they all come from?”
The burning search for truth, for beauty, for reason and everything worth knowing had struck me in a more poignant way than ever before, but that didn’t mean that I was any closer or more capable of finding answers.
I still felt unable to explain so many things.
Why did I have such a hard time in romantic relationships?
Why did dad really have to move out? Was it because he was a pervert?
Was I a pervert?
Why can’t I sleep at night?
Why did I have to be a boy?
Did I give one of my ex’s depression? To what degree did I contribute? Why couldn’t I help her?
Why am I so afraid of the thoughts in my head
It is hard to know how to help. I think at the end of the day I was just still the same kid trying to know what to say to the people I loved, to make them laugh. And I was incapable. We all fall short in life.
Love Me
I remember you driving me home after breaking up with my girlfriend my first year in Georgia. I was sick with a fever and so you flew in and drove all 11 hours straight and put me to bed. I cried in the car. It had felt like love to me but now here I was, broken again, embarrassed in front of the strongest person I knew, unsure of how to control what I was feeling.
The next year I met the woman I would marry. She was so shy, self-deprecating, unsure, beautiful. She was so scared and yet so brave. Moving to another country despite the sincere recommendations and concerns of many in her family. I looked into her eyes and I saw mine. I saw the eyes of a sinner, the eyes of someone who had seen cruelty and who had not yet decided if it was just to return it in kind. I knew that bravery was not the absence of fear but the will to push yourself further in its presence.
While I wasn’t sure about marriage, I felt that if anyone was deserving it was her. And she was there for me. I remember in 2020 when the pandemic and George Floyd protests kicked off, not knowing how to express words to the people closest to me. I remember feeling ripped from you two. Wondering if I would ever be close to my sister and mother again. Wondering if I was too stupid to see what the people I admired most were so sincerely trying to make me see.
I felt so lucky to have anyone, let alone her. I felt unworthy
Something You Admire
“Most of my fantasies are of
Making someone else cum
Most of my fantasies are of
To be of use
To be of some hard, simple undeniable use. “
Gasping, grasping, yearning, burning to be something that was worth the admiration of those I admired.
Come and Gone
“Nothing to say when It’s all been said and done.
When the curtain falls down I guess she wasn’t the one.
And how cliche, it’s how every story ends, the lover’s masks are all removed, revealed, re-cast as the friends”
I remember you visiting me nearly every day at the mental hospital, thinking you were the happiest person to be there each day you signed in. It was a place of trauma and dread and desperation was contagious. But just like the darkest nights, light crept in.
I did not believe in the teachings of mental health. It was all heuristics and language games. I felt the ability to flip every question around on the therapist, a hatred of the arbitrary nature of life. Yet for all my cynicism I could not deny when I looked into the eyes of those working there that they were sincere. They weren’t ever sure how to help but there they were present and trying all the same. The beautiful eyes of a sinner like me.
Imagine
“Do not go gentle”
Trying, desperately trying to see the best in people, the reason for life. The reason for happiness and pain. How to get to “ought” from “is”.
In this age of false prophets, who was worth following?
“Happy New Year”
The Most Beautiful Woman In the World
“For once in my life I won’t let sorrow hurt me, not like it’s hurt me before”
Does anyone really die in vain? Is your life worthless? Is there anything beyond all the flowery language?
“I’ve been searching for the meaning of life, no one’s tried before and likely I’m right”
I have struggled as humanity has struggled. Gripping, searching, squinting for something. And its not just humanity. A mother bird will mourn the eggs that hatch too late, or the babies that fall to their death. Elephants will return to the site of a companion’s last breath years later, drawn to something, like moths to the light, their only hope of existing, feeling for something there.
You have shown me that there is something there. And it is certain. It is not a question. It is not flowery language. It is not specious or grandiose or pretentious.
It is beautiful, it is simple, it is sacred, it is self-evident. It is life’s greatest discovery. It is revelation, redemption, and salvation in one, and it is simple, knowable, shareable:
The key to life is to see the best in others, and let that energy inspire them to see the best in themselves. Your kindness in seeing the best in them is not in vain. Kindness does not exist in a vacuum. By allowing others to recognize a better potential version in themselves, you unlock the same ability in yourself, you can learn to forgive all the negative thoughts, the self-hatred and the hatred of others. I do not know any truth if this is not called truth. Loving your neighbor allows you to love yourself.
It has taken me so long to learn, but I would never have learned it without extremely inspiring figures in my life.
And above all was the woman who refused to be average. Who simply loved so brightly and fully.
That is why you are the most beautiful woman in the world.
Thank you for loving me and saving me.
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey”