Monday, October 10, 2011

I Am Here Alone.

A couple of weeks have passed by since you left. Those weeks have felt like years and I feel as though I am in a no man's land.


I have made several abortive attempts at continuing on with my writing journey, but they are slow. They feel fruitless. Sometimes I sit in front of the screen for what feels like hours and nothing comes forth. The cursor blinks patiently as though waiting for my cue, ready and eager to skip across the pixels with a word trail fanning out behind it. But nothing happens. What am I doing?


It's not the same, now you are gone. I've no one to bounce ideas off of. No one to help me edit, no one to listen to me agonize over my sentences, my lines of dialogue, my random ideas. The story is there. It is mapped out. We mapped it out together - you and I. Over luke warm coffee at 2 in the morning when I couldn't sleep and I would pace outside on the patio with you, a pencil in hand, my journal on the outdoor table opened to receive those new ideas like radio signals from a distant star. Anyone else would have thought I was crazy, but not you. You never once.admonished me for my randomosity.


Now you are gone, I feel as though the ideas are locked behind an iron door. I stand alone on the patio now, at 2 in the morning and all I have is the moon and the stars to accompany me. I often wonder if one of those stars is you. Is it you?


I can't write you the way I did before. Before, you were beside me. I could reach down and pat your side, feel your fur and look into your eyes and know your character. I had such a vivid notion of you before and you lived on the page with such...life.


Now you live only in my memories. You reside in that place, so eloquently described by Thomas Harris as my 'memory palace' and those memories are much harder to make tangible. I feel as though they are fading - that you are fading - and soon I will lose my sense of you and how you were before.


I have not known this depth of sadness. Yes, I have lost loved ones, family members, friends. But never a companion such as you. You and I knew each other like nobody else did. It was unexplainable. It was just...there. You knew my emotions before I even knew them myself. You knew my routine, my quirks, my humaness. You tolerated my failings and you sought always to bring out the best in me.


You were my brother Simon, I loved you.


I miss the hell out of you.


DFA.





2 comments:

  1. I am sorry for your loss, Dean. I lost a literal brother two years ago and my world hasn't been the same since. My love and thoughts are with you.

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  2. Ah, but you *are* writing--you wrote this, and it's enough to make me teary-eyed. As we both sense, the loss of dogs is something inexplicably, particularly sad. You've immortalized him better than most of us ever thought to do with our pets, though, by putting him in your novel. Now we all got to know him too. Hugs!

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