A friend died last Wednesday.
It might seem odd calling him a friend, since I never saw him in the flesh, never spoke to him on the telephone, and have no idea what he looked like.
On the other hand, it might not seem so strange. Having such friends seemed and seems strange to me. But I was born in 1968. Someone born in 1990 would have no memory of not having such friends. Or at least the possibility of them.
I knew my friend was ill. I didn’t know he was getting worse. Possibly his family didn’t know he was getting worse. I kept hoping at irregular intervals as I went about my life that he’d get better. I suppose that’s what lots of people do in the same situation.
I went out the night I got the news. I didn’t stay out long. The people at the bar near my restaurant table screeched, snapped, and boasted. At the supermarket I saw three policemen lead away a young man in handcuffs. A young man with track marks on his arms.
Life goes on, in other words.
The news made everything seem different, for awhile. It might very well wear off. I’ve felt things like this wear off in the past.
I listened to a song that’s helped me through tough times in the past. A quiet, twangy song about overcoming. About assuming control naturalistically. It doesn’t show you how to do these things. Then again, art doesn’t often teach, didactically. It inspires.
Then I listened to the second song listed below. Brian Eno’s often said he makes lyrics up simply for the rhymes. But I find transcendence in “I am the wheel/I am the turning…”, at least. I find transcendence in the first song’s matter-of-fact images of the river, the ocean, the free fish, even.
I do not believe in an afterlife, in the sense of the survival of individual consciousness. But it gave me a little comfort to imagine my friend and eventually myself and all of us, incorporated in some sense, into something bigger than ourselves.
Goodbye. I will miss you.
– Andrew Hamlin
.
.
.
