Jess

Poets are the greatest believers of love, the greatest fools for it and the ones most likely to proclaim from mountain tops that though their lives be shambles, ash-worn and weary, love will triumph and the love that triumphs will look nothing like we expect. It's harder and comes after suffering and doesn't make things easier and sometimes you still wake up lonely, or you lose it or you never see it. Poets still go on proclaiming. Technically, they should start wearing llama skins and eating locusts because they're about two-degrees away from desert-dwelling shaman craziness.

But we all hope they're right...That "My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone" etc.

So I almost played piano this morning until my fingers fell off, precisely at each knuckle. To give my fingers a rest, I read poetry and so I was thinking about love. I decided not to think about familial love because that exists in a way deeper than I realize and I don't feel like untangling it and making myself homesick.

I hope I'm not the only person out there who sometimes wonders if they can love people in a way even approaching the poetic...selfless, pure and all that. There was a short story by David Foster Wallace I read last month. The character repeats over and over again how he's a fraud, a fraudulent person and all his feelings and beliefs are tainted by this fraud he lives. What you realize in the story, though, is that we're all jointed that way. We're all manipulating and stacking. I think DFW's point was, "Get over it." But he was one of those tricky clever people. I'd have to read the story again.

Anyway. Tangent. I'd like to think I love all the people I claim to love and I know, for the most part, what I say is true. There are some people, though, like my family, who I am rock solid in my assertion. There is no way I could not love them. This is also true of my friend Jess.

Years before I met her, on October 2, she was crumpled in a car and if a lot of things had gone differently, we might never have become friends. She might not have been around, is what I'm saying. This is a difficult thought to think now. A Jess-less world. Terrible thought. She has the best laugh I've ever heard. We almost accidentally kissed on the lips at her birthday party and she remains one of my dearest friends, always ready to perform "ceremonies" to celebrate random events with me because she (like me) thinks there should be more rituals and use of tea candles in daily life.

I love you, Trimmer. I'm glad you're still here.