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.