Last week wasn’t skipped. Not exactly.

The whole thing got writ, ‘round about fifteen hundred words, or so. It was even a bit optimistic, if I remember it correctly. Didn’t really read the whole thing back. The whole night became a blur.

You see, I try and ignore my phone while I do this particularly foolish task. Leave it in the other room. Once I finish, I feed back into that technological habit and start scrolling.

So, last week, I finished writing and looked at my phone. And everything changed, forever. And not in a good way. In the other kind of way. The worst kind of that other kind of way.

I suppose that’s the thing with tragedy. The kind in real lives, not in theatrical creations about it. It’s that seeing it coming would make it all easier to bear. The more you are able to anticipate something, the less tragic it ends up being.

Or maybe, I’m just talking out of my ass. Even worse than usual. But it was in this room, and in this chair, one week ago where I got hit. Bad. In this sacred room, made so not by gods or deities (your humble narrator excluded), but by the people that have graced it with their lives. With their beings, at a purer essence than most folks ever attain for more than a few moments, in this all too short life.

I’m digging for artifacts, only in order to find lost potential.

There’s a line from a song, that I scratched out earlier. ‘Losing tomorrow, by choosing today’. The words echoed impossibly around the back of my skull most of the day. Still don’t know why I wrote it down. You can ask me about the song later.

But I sip my whiskey and water. Sip, slowly. No real answers in those bottles, and I don’t aim to learn that the hard way, anymore.

Grief, though. Dastardly fellow, huh?

And if you haven’t gathered by now, that is the sort of idea and feelings that have been hovering around every waking moment for the last seven days. I suppose that I have been retreating inward, while absorbing outward expressions from loved ones so recently affected by the same event that has caused tremors to the core of my being. Dabbling in bad habits, in ways that a functioning, successful adult can. I cannot afford collapse in the face of cataclysmic occurrences. Nor, do I have any desire to.

It’s just the what to do in spite of all that. That’s the mystery that eludes me still, even with all the words scrawled and clacked out.

But, anyway. Moving forward. That’s all there is to do. Forward despite unrelenting desires hoping for alternative futures never to be had. And a massive amount of attention and effort into the balance between, intellectually, knowing the impossible, while still, the old heart cries out for that otherwise existence.

The heart. Oh, woe. That thing that this ol’ tinman tries to pretend doesn’t exist. Had a funny exchange, with a dear friend, a few weeks ago.

I says to him, forgetting the original context, I says ‘don’t be telling folks I have one of those (a heart). I have a reputation to uphold.

So, he says, ‘oh yeah… big secret.’

And I says, ‘For real, people think I’m a tough guy out there.’

And he says, he says, ‘I’ll keep that in mind, you big softie.’

See? Artifacts. Now ancient glyphs never to be occurring again.

So, in the face of loss, what now? Making the plans that I can, while trying to ignore the ones that I know I cannot. And further, attempting not to ponder the plans made, now never to be fulfilled. Or, at least trying not to think of them as broken promises. In my anger, sometimes I do.

Everyone mourns in their own way. Indeed, I am in mourning. In such moments, I balance between absurd levels of self-blame, wherever I can find an application (ye ol’ millennial christ complex), and distracting my self in tasks. Or, in the supporting of others. The exhausting but necessary lighthouse state of being. If not a beacon, at least a place to help find shore, somehow. All while still unable to shake the sense of failure in the help I’ve failed to cast. Left with the ache of all that is now exclusively memory. Knowing the future holds no more new ones. Not with the souls gone from this plane, at least.

Oh, the guilt, again.

There have been thoughts on faith. On trust. In the great oblivion beyond this mortal coil. A nice thought, we might meet again, someday. Not sure if I believe that, being a skeptic of such things, but it is still a nice symbol. And boy, howdy, am I a sucker for some poetic symbolism. The more futile, the better. The more irresistibly beautiful, the more doused elegance, the more I’ll crave it. Sunsets, song selections, the cardinal at the birdfeeder with the crest so big it looks like a mohawked singer of a hardcore band.

Was talking to another friend, earlier, about being tired of so much of life being a compromise. The curse of limited, forward moving timelines. The illusion of choice, perhaps. But the constant sense of self-sacrifice in order to just meet the ever-mounting demands of eking out an existence. Only so much time to put into so many places. Lots of whys can easily follow.

But I know why, more or less. Why one should keep trying. Not in exact words, but I think I know why the compromises get made to continue to march forward. It is the moments found with all that chaos. The laughter of a friend. The growth of a child as they find their own feet in this existence. Love, I’ve heard tell. And know so, when talking about the love I have for my friends, my family. It is dance parties in living rooms, and impromptu jams on coffee shop lawns until the cops get called.

As my friend told me once, ‘do you want to play music? You don’t have to, but it’d be better if you did.’

Those sorts of things, that’s why. You just have to keep trying, and keep hoping that its enough. But only you get to decided that, I suppose.

Yet still, I think of suffering. Cough, catholic upbringing, cough. Of the personal kind and universal alike, and all that goes on between those two spectral opposites. I think about the suffering that we admit, and all that we deny. Of the anguish of others, sometimes, so expertly disguised. And the introspective insight so viscerally granted in hindsight. The kind that seems so obvious to the mysteries of future our past used to hold, before we got to the truth of the present. Arrogant, for sure. Greedy little three-dimensional beings, are we, stuck on a one-way track of mind through time, and thinking we know the way forward.

As the day began to fade, today, the shade of gray hovering over was broken and from beyond that atmospheric blanket emerged the star that we all have always called home. Assuming I don’t have any intergalactic readers, that is. But anyway- the sun showed up just at the end, to bid farewell for now. Warm, inviting, and all the birds sang in agreement. As though it were a smile, a laugh, an embrace known to be never felt again. One last warning from the center of the solar system, that onward is still the future for your humble narrator.

The last few days, I’ve been numb. That was not the case a few days before that. Hiding on top of the stairs, sobbing like a blubbering fool, I listened to my daughter play her ‘tiny guitar’. A gift I got her ages ago, which had only truly come to life a few months ago. All because of my friend. The one I grieve. The one who is now gone. I haven’t gotten to telling her yet. Don’t know how I will, but I must. Need to get a better grip on myself first, I’d suppose. And besides, he’s still so very alive in her mind. I’ll use that cheat code and feed off of that for a little bit. Being the selfish being, that I be.

I thought I had decades left with him, my friend. Turns out, my last day was only a few days ago. I’ll say this- hug the people you love. You never know which one will be the last one.

A grim thought, I know. But I can assure you, it is a very real one.

I have to remember to take the garbage to the curb, tonight. Forgot the last two weeks in a row. First week, was St. Patrick’s Day. So, that. Last week, because part of my universe imploded, so pretty much everything else slipped my mind.

But I have to take it out tonight. I wouldn’t want a bear to get into it. Or, maybe I do.

Inside joke. A darker kind. But Doctor, I am Pagliacci.

He would have laughed at that, me thinks. I found myself proud of how much I could make him laugh. He did have, the very best laugh.