I found a song that you would like. I still have conversations with you in my head- things I've done recently that are cool, minor accomplishments, my first meeting as a dramaturg, projects I'm working on... Your absence is heavy, especially in these moments.


Pulmonary Embolism.
You look pretty close to a suicide.
I am so envious of the long death,
the kind that inches you away with each breath.


Sudden death is so strange. Especially when you were raised with death on your mind at all times. You live each day with the full understanding that it may be your last, it may be your brother's last, your sister's, your mother's,  father's. I've spent my whole life dedicated to understanding and accepting death. And I had, in fact, understood and accepted death.
And yet, when the cord snaps, when the body collapses right in front of you, struggling, trying to recover like it's any other day, and it turns out that it really is any other day, because death is always possible, and that's how death strikes- something changes inside of you, something that wants to turn your reasons and morbid obsessions into disbelief and anger. You wish you didn't understand it. You wish that understanding it would at least help you figure out how to deal.
Nothing is earned, nothing is gained. No new insight. No added perspective.
That's why they call it a loss. You only lose, and lose and lose, until you end up wondering what you even have left, and what parts of you are still there, underneath the rubble.

I want to be able to keep your belongings, but I'm unable to, because I don't have a place to put them, because the only place I had to put them was your home, which is no longer your home, which is no longer mine.

So we surrender your poetry
and reduce you to debt.