"...leave me sitting pen in hand / With the smoke coming down above the housetops; / Doubtful, for a while / Not knowing what to feel or if I understand / Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon…"

It's around Christmas and I'm drunk, walking out of a bar in New York and feeling a bit wistful when, upon realizing the length of my travels I called you. I suppose as many of our best times had this flavor, it made me think it was a good time to catch up, make jokes about how many days you would get off for Hanukkah, and just say "hi." You were at home and we discussed briefly, as the inebriated are wont to do, the merits and perils of brown liquor and the terrible clean brightness of the subsequent days. When I hung up I had a smile and we had a laugh and then I pushed my hands through my coat pockets and was off to continue the night, and you presumably to do the same.

But now the last time we spoke was indeed just that, the last time we spoke. And what could be more cruel than the simplest fact: that the signal will always be busy when I try to reach you again, an even beating of tones as long as I want to stay on the other side? Oh Mike. Nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
"But what have I, but what have I, my friend, To give you, what can you receive from me?"

How could I presume to write about the things that were bought and sold between friends, the experiences that are owned by several people but now with the passing of one, fall to the shoulders of the remaining to carry it on (but now perhaps are owned or defined by the missing)? And what of us now, still creating these things and still forming the careful sand of our lives; how much of ourselves now are owned by him, and how much of the future will be defined by the absence of someone who was a musician but in his friends' lives was more apt to play conductor, and when successful created such a beautiful song?

But now we are alone. Now we sit with our instruments, looking at the music and find ourselves hopelessly unable to find the rhythm, hitting instruments with blunt hands--there is no sense in this type of silence and the fortissimo created by my voice and the wailing of others will no more fill that void than a set of pictures, held on a server somewhere, in a distant, cold and clandestine space, sharing a room with a million ideas and feelings that are impossible to value until their authors are gone, and then are valued all too easily: "I would give Anything to have those times back." But the going rate of Anything is simply not high enough. And we are all strong enough, until the day we aren't.

"I just wade the tides that turned..."

Please know that I'm not mad that you felt you had to go. I'm not mad that you stood up when the barrage came and took it head on. Instead I wonder what happened, that you looked around and said "I can't." But I understand the pull. I know the sweat, and the heat and the pressures that could make a diamond back into coal. I just wish you just held out a hand, or gave a look to any of us so that we could have jumped on you and sheltered you, burying you in love. I impotently hope for just a hint so that we could have done the things that friends are supposed to do when they sign the contract in smiles and loose limbs. We were teammates so many times. You didn't have to go this alone.

And who am I to judge? I left San Francisco telling no one. I spat on the respect that was due to the people who cared about me, thinking to myself "I don't want to explain this, the shame is great" and "I don't owe anyone anything! I'm grieving." But most of all I recognized that if I told anyone what was happening I would receive the plaintive response "You can do this, you don't have to leave, we will help you" and I didn't want to hear it. My mind was made and the steps were in place, so I put my head down, started my car with all of my things and left, only to make a cowardly call to you and others from Nevada, after I was lifetimes gone and traveling even further away, free of this perceived "burden" of friendly support.

How then do I levy a complaint against you, who opted to avoid telling anyone so you could make his escape and waited until after you were gone to tell anyone what was happening by way of a note? Absence said everything it needed to and after that, the information is superfluous: "I don't belong." Nothing could be further from the truth.

"Did you add up all the cards left to play to zero?" 

As we look in the mirror that our now departed friend holds up to our faces, with edges sculpted and gilded in the gold of another place--a place with beauty as simple as truth but infinitely harder to hold--and we try to look at him we can only see the object in front of us, trying harder to remember what's behind it only to see more clearly ourselves; everyone sees the tears and knows that some percentage of each of those tears is made up of salt, and some percentage water, and some percentage devoted to what this means about us: what it says about the people that we are, the things we are capable of, and the things that we, despite our infinite vision fail to see. The things that we, despite our infinite skills, fail to do. And the people, despite our infinite love, who cannot be saved.