Spending a forever with anyone is a gift.  Trying and arduous and tortuous and obscenely beautiful.

I see couples daily who waddle in together at ninety.  Who laugh at one another's hypochondria.  Who fill in the missing pieces of confused and dawdling medical histories.  Who hold one another's hands during procedures which seem so foreign and terrifying and confusing.

The intimacy of several decades is irreplaceable.  Astounding.  But truly a test of endurance. Dedication.  Commitment.

I used to be under the impression--and continue to be, on the odd Tuesday--that commitment makes things dull.  That some of the shine of life erodes with days and days stacked one upon the other with the same face, the same hands, the same sex.

And yet, perhaps, I judge too harshly.  Too quickly.  Perhaps the real art is the making of something lovely over the course of many monotonous days.  Of looking at the one you have chosen and consciously loving them every single day for as long as you both live.  In laughing as bodily functions become intimate and inside jokes become so layered that one intermingles with the others in a perfectly seamless manner.

Perhaps the true test, in the end, is not of unconscious and tortured dedication but of creativity.  Of waking each day to a new nuance of a partner's humor, a new gray hair, a new song that speaks to you both on such a deep level that you play it on EVERY juke box in every bar you happen to wander into in any midwestern city on any day.

Perhaps the beauty, as with so many other things, is in the choice.  Is in the finite, inordinately stunning moments of utter mundanity that, somehow, become rich because of the human beside you.

There are so many things I would tell you, were you right beside me snacking on a bowl of cereal at ten pm.

I would tell you how exhausting and utterly creatively deprived working forty hours can be.  The waking up, the commuting, the ten hour shift, followed by a quick dinner, and repeat for four more days.  I believe this whole system is bonkers and we have all lost our minds.  Money is, after all, a made up thing.  It means something only because we say it does.  But there is food and heat and comfort here and so we sell our lives to a job because it is easy.  Because it is comfortable.  I would tell you I see the insanity in these days, in these minutes that are racing by.  I see them but cannot change things for now.

I would tell you, immediately afterward, that while I say I cannot change this situation I am lying to you.  Any of us, at any given moment, can change every single thing about the current trajectory of our lives.  I believe now--as I did so many years ago--that our dreams are only a moment away.  An insane moment of bravery from existing.

So perhaps the startling truth is I am just lazy.  Or ready to be mindlessly numb for a bit.  Ready to pay off some loans.  To have some real paychecks.  To feel grown up for the first moment since we graduated so many years ago.  To wear my big kid panties (they are, still, endlessly childish).

I would tell you that I want my own children, despite my rantings and ravings about how selfish the decision is.  I would even soulfully admit that, if possible, I would like more than two.  I would like them all to be close in age so that at times my home is nearly erupting with insanity.  I want things, my time here, to be as wild and out of control as possible.  I want a home spewing with love and family and busyness and devotion to one another and the world. I want these things even though I would have denied it just a few years ago.

I want, most of all, to still believe in ideals and the beauty of human beings as I continue to walk on this planet.  I want to see a sunrise and the mountains in the west and find myself utterly breathless at the sheer beauty of the gift of being alive.  I don't want a single moment to lose its shimmer because I still ardently believe my child eyes were the most honest.  The least tired.  The least jaded.  And I hope I can always recognize just how much it matters to believe in something.  Anything, really.  So long as the belief is deeply rooted, pervasive, and eruptive into the fabric of every detail of one's life.

And of course, my dear friend, I would end in telling you how much I adore you.  How much I love you.  How much I miss our gallivanting but recognize its passing as I must the passing of so many other beautiful moments in life.  That time is complete and we served one another so well.  Continue to do so (as evidenced by these words).  But it is not our time to be together any longer.  You have gone and I have gone and all we have between us now is the change our meeting catalyzed.

I love you so dearly.  I hope you recall in each bowl of cereal and microbrew, each practical joke entailing the use of new car smell, and every book nailed to the wall of an apartment (has there ever been more than one?) that there is beauty in every action.  In every moment.

Be brave, my dear one, in moments of adversity.

Generous in the presence of need.

Hopeful in the company of skeptics.

Loving to those who are lost.

Joyful despite your darkest moments.

Sincere to all those you meet.

Be true to the voice which has been with you all these long, long days.

And if cornered, recall there are many, many escapes from a puzzle.

Know that you are surrounded by love.

And that you will find me, my dear one, not far from you.

Because my heart rests--it always has--nearest to yours.

I wish you were here.  There are a thousand things I would say to you and you would nod in silent understanding.  Because you have always simply understood.

They say laryngeal cancer.  And now I understand it's just a vague term we use for the random, overproduction of certain cells.  We categorize because humans must.  But we understand so little about the disease.  And each of us responds to it and the archaic treatments we provide in such a different way that it is difficult for me to feel calm about this.  It is difficult for me not to feel panic and fear and terror and multitudinous other out-of-control emotions about what is to come.

There will be radiation and sickness and an inability to swallow.  And maybe he will be here when it is all done.  But maybe he will linger, momentarily, before disappearing from our lives forever.  And forever is such a very, very long time.  And I don't know what that absence will do to those I love.  I don't think they will be the same afterward.  I don't think they will be okay.

Because the death of family is something that changes the world forever.  It becomes slightly less full than it was.  There is an absence, a chair which was once filled at the dinner table.  We move on because we must but perhaps not willingly.  The world takes on a different hue, a darker one.  And every memory, however beautiful, is marked by the absence of shared experience with the one who was lost.  Everything that person is not there for is touched by a sadness, tinged with a sense that things are somehow incomplete.

I worry about those I love because I wonder if they will be capable of being the same afterward.  I dread the pain which will become all of ours during the grueling physical incapacity of treatment.  I dread watching those I hold most dear walk this journey with an outcome which is far, far from certain.

There are no words for me without you.  Emptiness and loneliness fall too flat.  They're too cliche.

The air here, without you, it's thinner.  And joy seems impossibly foreign.

But even those are cliche.  Mundanities.

This without you, this thing without you--having known you for a fraction of a second--makes the entirety of life ahead seem too long, too hard.

Having known your lips.  The ecstasy of exhausted kisses.  The comfort of being your little spoon. Knowing I laugh like that for you. Only for you. Knowing this life devoid of you is missing numerous belly strains. Devoid of church giggles. Devoid of turning misfortune on its head.

You made my home where our hearts rested.

And without you, I find myself homeless.

I miss you.  It is too late to say that, of course.

I love you.  I am too mature to transgress in such a way.

And so I shall simply say, my dearest, good luck.

I hope your heart finds a place to rest.

It wouldn't be so bad if it happened to be near to mine.

Children.  A word gargantuan enough to swallow me whole.

A blessing if I am able.

A plague if I am not.

In every book I have read, I am not certain there is an author adept enough to portray the necessary changes which must occur when bringing another life into the world.  Parents vehemently tell me that nothing can prepare me, that nothing comes close.  And so I necessarily must concur because I see a shaky conviction in their eyes, a weightiness to their statement that infers a knowing which cannot be expressed through any method but sheer knowing.  Through feeling the thing plopped down into your arms some odd Tuesday having never held a baby before let alone changed a diaper.

And it is this silence, this beyond words nature of children that truly terrifies me.  There is an old adage that to read many books is to live many lives.  I feel--having read like a psychotically ill loner--that I have lived many, many times over.  And yet, I feel parenthood is not something I can really touch.  It is not something I can understand.

And so I stand on the precipice of this decision an utterly blind person.  If I do then it "changes you forever in so many wonderful and indescribable ways (big fake, condescending smile)" and if I don't, then I am selfish and one of the losers in Darwin's survival of the fittest model.

I am so, so torn about the entire topic.  I want children because I think little humans are lovely and have so much to teach us about the world.  But on the other hand, I don't want to bring another, stinking human into the planet.  I feel like I do okay as far as humans are concerned and, even so, about 80% of the time I'm not very proud of my environmental or socioeconomic consciousness.  

And so I am at a crossroads of defying social convention by being the loner infertile womb or doing it and rushing head first into an adventure for which I am not certain I'm prepared.

I have never had warm, maternal feelings.  I doubt I ever will.  I am much too neural.  Much too close to insanity.

If only there was something to do about all the missing.  Because this now is truly something remarkable.  And trust me when I tell you that I find joy here, too.

But to turn my mind's eye back and to see us as younger versions of ourselves before we discovered the outside world...that is truly something to behold.  Imagine us then, before the Frodo and Bilbo had been proven impossible, before the choosing of what we do for a living (which inevitably and heartbreakingly becomes us), and before we moved (or were carried, perhaps) so far from one another.

There is a house, too, that I think of often.  With old, creaking floors and a wildwood directly behind. There are baths of oatmeal for the poison ivy and cardboard swords and a world I would not have the courage or audacity to create any longer.

And we are there.  All together.  Playing night games with skinned knees in the late summer twilight. Or cuddled together with the old piano hammering Christmas tunes to our off key renditions of hymns. And we are there, certainly, on the nights of feet of snow, snuggled as close as possible to the wood-burning cast iron stove.

And even though so much of that youth was filled with unknowing - the unfamiliarity of this body and this heart, of where I was headed, of who I would become - there was so much beauty in the wandering.  So much beauty in the long, drawn out, and often boring summer days.  Because at least, then, being together was not simply reserved for holidays and weddings and the off chance of running into one another on some distant, distant weekend.

There is missing interminably behind me.  In every moment that has passed and every person whose heart no longer beats close to mine.  There is beauty in time's passage and there is normalcy there, but to be together again, locked in singular moments of grace and loveliness would be quite a gift.  To see you go off, then, my old friend and find your own place in this world gives me such great joy.

Joy beyond joy.  But sadness, too.  Because you are there without me.  And, inevitably, we will grow old apart.  Apart.  Such a wicked, awful word.  Because there is no you in it.  None at all.

There are as many ways to love someone as there are ways to say goodbye.

I remember you in the rain-soaked restaurant after a long drive to the coast, candlelight, and wine-drenched warmth.  And I remember the phone conversation where I said I couldn't do it any longer and the consciousness of the havoc I wrought.

And you in the dark with the taste of freshly gained independence in my mouth.  The illicit nature of being there with you, your hair running through my hands, the discovery of losing myself in the night hours.  And the slow, painful tearing apart that went on for months and months and months before I saw the writing on the wall.

And raucous, uncontrollable laughter in the most extreme travels of my life.  You my light, my companion of humor in what would otherwise have been extraordinarily terrifying moments.  Then the alcohol and the other women and the most painful goodbye on those long country roads.

I knew each of you so intimately.  You were as inextricable from my being in that given time and place as my own hands, my own heart. And yet we trudged ceaselessly toward our own version of goodbye. But at our peak, we were really something, weren't we?  Something to behold.  People would probably use the phrase "young love."  But that's a stupid saying, meaningless.

Slow, meandering moments in the dark. Long, tortuous lapses of time between each caress.  Nervous anticipation. One touch. In solidarity so painful.  In combination ecstasy.

Ecstasy.  A word reserved for you and I.  And you and I.  And also (probably) you and I.  In that particular time

The worst entrapment must necessarily be self inflicted.  Employment.  Marriage.  Children.  We do it all the time.  Decisions which are expected become the means through which we're prevented from self actualization.  Prevented from happiness through concern for others.  Which sounds entirely selfish and insane.  Truly.  And yet, I believe one can be married and one can have children and one can have a career.  But it should be done, most certainly, on one's own terms and without compromise.

Which is easier said than done.

Nearly impossible, by my calculations.

I still see you in my dreams. Us. Always we are there and we are laughing like we used to.  Endlessly. Raucously.  Like we always did.  We were so impractical, you and I.  And yet, I can't help wishing you were here now.  Because when you were with me nothing was serious and no problem was so great we couldn't chase it with laughter.  And in the dark of the evening, in your arms, everything else faded. 

But we were so god damn impractical, you and I.  

You drank too much and slept with too many.  I too intolerant of even one mistake.

It's never in my conscious moments that we're together again, but always in my dreams.  Because even though I wouldn't want you now--I'll be clear, I would never want you again--I miss so, so desperately the wild, red-tinted edges the world took on when I was with you.  Every touch, every joke, every fleeting moment when your eyes met mine was more exhilarating than every moment since.

And isn't our insanity absolutely transparent?  Isn't this madness I am preaching?  I willingly left, plodding so quickly forward some of what we were is gray and blurry in my mind.  I went on and forgot and grew up.  But the heart does not so quickly forget.  It relives you and I so often.  I cannot escape you nor doubt I truly will.  I will replay us--God that we had never ended--until the end of my days.

Tortured by the impracticality of us.  And yet, ceaselessly basking in the pleasure of having lived even a solitary second by your side.  Thank god for those precious, fleeting moments.

I miss meeting you here in this space.  It is at first so very, very empty.  And yet, with you in my mind and these words to fill this page, somehow what was once blank and devoid of meaning becomes a place we share.  I find you here, my dearest.  Always here.  In the words we have shared.  So many, many words.

I find the passage of time creeping into my thoughts without my permission.  I find myself longing for you and for the time we spent preoccupied with development of the soul.  Absurdly overwhelmed with all the nothing.  I had a paper due in four weeks.  And so instead of writing it, we sat and listened to good music.  We talked abut the world as though we could know it.  And perhaps we did.  Perhaps better than we do now what with the rushing and obligations and growing up.

Growing up is rather dreary work, isn't it?

We took our pups to the dog park tonight.  A cool, summer night with ample grass and pups walking around joyously and being nothing but mundane creatures who find love in every beat of the heart (a rather goofy species, aren't they? which is why we must love them so dearly?).  As I was driving home, I thought about all the times as I got older that I put off playing kick the can or some other crazy kid night game.  How many times did I think to myself, "I'll just do it tomorrow night."  In some kind of crazy blur, doing it another night has disappeared and now I am far too old without the excuse of my own child to go gallivanting through the streets playing with other humans.  And yet, from the very depths of my soul, it is so desperately what I wish to do.  I wish to stay out too late with the smell of grass worn into my knees and my muscles exhausted from the kind of running only kids do.  The kind of running that is NOT forced on a treadmill for the sake of blood pressure.  The heart thumping dear-lord-has-he-seen-me hide-and-seek kind of running.  I want to dash about and find new friends and be friends simply for having played.  When we were younger, having played was enough.

I have to imagine we still have that in us, even after all these years of drudgery.  Surely, underneath it all, we all just want to be barefoot.

I showed my good buddy Shannon the "Scared is Scared" video you posted on my facebook wall a bit back.  I made some off the cuff, conversation-making comment about how neat kids are.  And with great sincerity, she responded, "It's marvelous, all the things they have to teach us.  Think of all the things we could learn from them."  It struck me how outlandish and preposterous that thought was.  In our society, kiddos are the idiots.  They're the ones who have the growing up to do.

What if, all along, we were smartest--bravest--at the age of six?  Maybe we knew more then.  Maybe being here longer than twelve years is the thing that makes us stupidest of all.

I know adulthood has good things for us.  I know I should be excited to do adult things like work a job about which I feel mostly apathy and raise life-sucking money-squandering kids of my own, but I don't.  I want to curl up in a tent pitched between two couches in a living room and play forts with my brothers.  I want to find you there on the couch in our dorm room with a good microbrew and dear lord I want to waste so much time.  I want to waste and waste and waste and find at the end of it all that I am rather the opposite of empty.  That, indeed, I am so full there is hardly room for Moonstruck.  And yet, you know me, I will always find room for cocoa.

And so my dearest, we will go out in the rain-soaked evening.  Our clothes are still damp from our walk up the hill, but we will go, anyway.  And we will drive through the tree-lined streets in the darkness, up and over the hills, and there, strip mall lights beaming out of the Portland gloom, we will shop the pastries and the chocolates and we will ultimately decide on the cocoa.  Because we always drink the cocoa.  Always.

I did not realize at Lewis and Clark how finite our time was.  I thought the rest of life must necessarily march on in the meaningful way our education did at that particular Hogwarts.  I have found in my adult life, more often than not, we are adult zombies.

Which brings me, of course, to the speech I made at Pete's wedding.  I haven't been writing.  I am sure you have noticed the lack of words here (or anywhere).  As such, I was nervous to write a speech.  And being who I am, I put it off.  Until the day it was to be given.  I awoke that morning in quite a fright (mostly sad because it struck me how awfully much my family has changed) and realized I had better get to writing.  And so I awoke in a mansion overlooking a golf course and the Lake of the Ozarks and I peered through a wall of glass out to an approaching storm and convinced myself I could be inspired.  But it didn't come easy.  Not at all.  Not like it used to.

Perhaps because I wanted it to mean something clear and perhaps because I was a bit rusty and perhaps because feeling as sad as I did about all the people around me changing I couldn't think of anything nice to write.  Imagine standing in front of a crowd of room shouting out some depressing Kundera nonsense.  That would not do.  It simply would not.

And so I took my time and I listened to Valley of the Shadow and This Is Neverland and Mayan Bowl Breaks and I wrote what I could and I slipped in as much Kundera as possible (emphasizing, of course, the positive points...the few that exist:).  And I wrote this:

As a group, humans are undeniably infatuated with dreaming.  We are asked from a very young age where we see ourselves as we get older and imagine up wild realities.  From becoming the president of the United States to escaping this reality for that of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis to pursuing the life of a vagabond writer or musician, caring neither for money, food, or company, we humans are nothing if not fantastic creators of fiction.   And I will not stand here and argue that any of those pursuits, particularly that of running off with Frodo, Gandalf, or Gypsies, is ignoble. 

This life, however, is unceasingly fleeting.  It is an inconvenient truth that while the years of our lives seem endless as children, they progress so steadily that it is difficult to account for all the time.  And worst of all, so glaringly apparent in all of the difficult choices we make, there is no dress rehearsal when it comes to the thousands and thousands of decisions we are required to make.  We get to do this thing once, one time, and with blind faith pray that our hearts, our dreaming, has not led us astray.

All of this, the wild sprint from an adorable little zygote in the belly of our mother to that of a tottering old woman without the opportunity for a redo, is enough to drive any reasonable person mad.  And yet, despite all this, the graces of this life are innumerably present.  From the powerful meander of a thunderstorm to the kindness of strangers, we humans fill pages with the beauty held in any particular moment.

While there are multitudinous graces in this life, the greatest and most important—the only one worth taking our time—is present in all of its diverse forms here today.  From mother to son, brother to sister, dear friend to dear friend, the greatest gift of this life is having found others with which to share this journey.  There is little else that can hold such deep or resonating importance as to courageously make this walk with a group of humans whose hearts and souls and desires are inextricably tied to yours.

And so, what I dream for all of us here today is not a life filled with wealth, power, or prestige.  What I dream for each of us is the pursuit of a life filled bursting at the seams with meaningful moments with those we love.  I dream of long nights with too little sleep stuffed uncomfortably full with deep conversation.  I dream for all of us, but especially these two, on this day, their lives be inordinately filled with love.

I wrote that because it was all I could think of.  Sometimes I don't know what to say in my adult life.  Sometimes it is all too much.  But love, at least, has remained the same.

Which is why I miss you here, in this place.  In these words.  Because it has (and will remain) a place I love you so well.