Kittens On Rollerskates

This is not what I usually post here. This is not why I started this blog. But this is also the place I’ve set aside to write about how I’m feeling, and though mercifully usually I feel like playing too much, today I don’t. I have lost someone I love very dearly, and my heart is surely broken. His name was Taylor, and he was just…the best. He was among the most creative artists I’ve ever known, and likely the most talented. He lived with me in the first house I ever owned. We made rice and vegetables and tempeh together. We made music together. We drank, and drank, and played bocce ball. We watched movies and went to shows and we shot pool and we did all this with Kent, and three of us spent more than a year doing precious little else.

This was us, about to go get Mebican. Kent, me, Taytay.

We laughed, so much, and so hard we couldn’t breath but we could cry. We got drunk and went to Waffle House after midnight. We were the Shall Nots, and we made lists of commandments for ourselves, like Though Shall Not Google The Unknowable, and mottos, like Too Drunk To Flinch. He hated mosquitos so hard, so Kent and I would roll our eyes and go smoke inside. We were all Aries but we never fought. We liked this truck stop on the way home from Mexican food in Mebane, or to those in the know, Mebican. The truck stop was huge and mall-like and radically pro-hunting. We wrote songs and spent hours and hours hours hours hours recording them to Taytay’s sky high standards at his home studio, and when he moved into my house, my converted attic studio. His voice was beyond beautiful, it haunted and it moved like wings, like you were hearing history. And Kent and I would look over at each other while he sang with his eyes squeezed shut and his brow all furrowed, and while sounds came out of this person that…I keep deleting and trying again, but there just aren’t words. His first studio wasn’t air conditioned and it was August and 90 at night and my body would go limp and I’d lay flat on my back and my skin would crawl and cover itself with goosebumps, and for a while, I’d live in this Other space he’d just created, then he’d just finish a song and ask who else needed a beer, and we’d laugh because he didn’t know, couldn’t know.

Kent went out of town, so we video chatted instead.

We three loved each other on a cellular level. Taylor, especially, loved in such a way that you loved yourself more for it. He refused to acknowledge that part of you was a shitty person, and steadfastly saw you as beautiful and perfect, like your imperfections made you a masterpiece. It made you tell him things about yourself that you had to rip out and hand over, and he listened like a mother loves, completely and intently, constantly. The songs we wrote were about not giving up and seeing this whole fucking insane thing through to the end, about playing what you were dealt and maybe pulling an ace out of your sleeve sometimes. That’s what he could never do, he could never claim what was his fucking own, his rightfully, I guess until now. In life he gave away too much. He gave more to me than I to him, and now I’m out of chances. The last time I saw him was at a bar when he was passing through town, and I told him I would go to his show, and I didn’t. I was tired and had worked all day and I didn’t. The next day on Facebook he asked if my legs had broken and I’m a smartass so I liked the comment. Part of me is a shitty person. Yeah yeah I know I know, You Couldn’t Have Known and Remember The Good Times. But also, One Time It Will Be The Last Time. I am taking something else of his now, I am taking it out of the air. I will love better and listen more and tomorrow at his funeral I will promise him that and tell him I’m sorry and I will know that I was already forgiven. And when I’m done falling apart I will pull myself together again, but better.