Heartbeat

Yo Punko.

Sometimes I think I can move past you being gone, but it's just not possible. I wanted to be with Eve and Coggy for their dinner at Greens, it looks like they had a great time.

August 25th is also the day D moved in with us. He gets the red "You are special today" plate at dinner, and we toast him and talk about how happy we are. Last night was adorbale, and we toasted eachother, clinking a glass of milk, an almost empty glass of milk, and a Shiner Bock. We ate our dinner and felt happy.

Minutes later I was exhausted and I wasn't sure why. I laid down on the couch and almost immediately went to sleep. As I drifted off I could hear voices as Shannon put D to bed, reading him Dr. Suess or whatever.

Then I woke up with a racing pounding in my chest. my heart was pumping hard and fast. It felt like a panic attack, but I didn;t feel panicky...just worried about my pulse. I scrounged around for a heartrate/blood pressure cuff I bought (thanks again for the genes, Dad) and slipped it on. 115 over 65. Normal.

It wasn't until Shannon mentioned, almost in passing, that perhaps I was feeling stressed about not being at Greens with the sisters that my ticker started to even out. I realized that in some deep place I was horribly missing you, that August 25th will never be the same, and will forever be a jumbled mix of the worst day of my life and one of the best.

I used your tools this weekend to make a playset for the kids. They make me think of you. Maybe tonight I'll bolt more shit on the thing.

N

Miss you, love you.

South America For You

Hey Sky,

It is two years later and my heart still hurts like hell. Every year for the past two years, I drank too much in your honor on this date. This year, I decided to be proactive and snowboard for you. I am in Chile snowboarding right now. I wish you were here, you would have loved it. I still miss you and I will drink one too many gin and tonics today. However, this year it will be different. Instead of drinking by myself, I will drink with a couple random Chileans and tell them in Spanish how great you are.

Next stop: Africa

- Han

Can't sleep

What was it like for you, this night, 2 years ago? What horrors, what waking nightmares? Oh, Sky.

Tonight Coggy and I had dinner at Greens, chosen in your honor. Dinner rocked. You would have loved it, all veggie stuff of course. We laughed our way all through dinner. Then when we got our credit cards out to pay, we both also brought out the pictures of you that we each keep in our wallets, all the time. Coggy's is an adorable school pic of you, not this one but I can't find that one, which is a few years younger.


Mine is your crazy high school ID card with the "Follow Me to Hooters" sign. You fucking nut.


I don't even know how to feel the depth and breadth of this loss. I'm still just blindly feeling my way around the edges of this thing.

Jesus, I miss you, bro. We all do. I guess I don't have the right words to even say it right.

No way am I getting to sleep any time soon tonight.

I love you, baby. I'm sorry. Hope you're having safe travels, happy trails, peace.

xo,Eve

2

I guess it was predictable that it would get bad again. For weeks now, every little thing summons that sick, trembling feeling in my stomach.

Sometimes it's the yellow jeeps. One will drive right by, blatant, and midsentence I'll forget what I was saying, or thinking, or where I was going. Sometimes they park along the route I walk, mute reminders of you. Other times they'll pass at the fringes of my vision, momentary ghosts reflected in shopfront windows, or rearview mirrors -- gone by the time I've swivelled to see. I've lost count of the times I've caught myself staring vacantly out of coffeeshop windows at a pair of receding taillights, or standing on the sidewalk, blankly regarding some piss-yellow Wrangler wedged up against a curb.

Sometimes it's not a jeep; it's a slender man with an unruly chestnut thatch and a thin T-shirt. Invariably he's alone, off in the middle distance. One afternoon he was sitting in the eucalyptus grove by the science building, poking at leaves with a stick; a couple of times he was crossing the street, an intersection away, his back turned. He's always just far enough away, just indistinct enough for the resemblance to be momentarily, heartbreakingly plausible.

Sometimes it's an old scrap of paper that surfaces unexpectedly -- your jotted-down pager number, a thank-you note in your cramped handwriting. Sometimes it's a storefront or an old apartment building or an entire neighborhood (hell, an entire city) wound up in old memories of you. A particular bench in the botanical garden; a particular gas pump you once defaced (adorned?) with anti-oil propaganda, now restored to sleek, corporate anonymity. Insects and omelettes and external-frame backpacks... or maybe just a certain vague aesthetic, a sort of defiantly contrarian dilapidation, that makes me think, "You would have loved this." You're lurking in all of these things, and the million and one little reminders of you never seem to soften, never wear down into something comforting. They still leap out and sock me in the stomach, a million and one sickening opportunities to realize all over again the loss, and the horror, and the fact that you're gone.

Worst of all, the awful feeling's always, always there at night, when I can't sleep. Sometimes there's just no staving off those ghastly, half-conscious hours spent cycling through a litany of regrets and remembrances, the inane repetitions that I'm sorry, over and over, however much I know I have nothing to be sorry for. This isn't how I want it to be; I know it's not what you'd have wanted... but somehow, knowing that never seems to fix it. I miss you. I keep waiting for this to get better. Sometimes it is, a little, but not lately. Not today.

Remembering Sky

Dear Eve, Carolyn & Nick:

I just wanted to say something separate from everything else about how sorry I am for the loss of your brother, Sky. My heart goes out to all three of you. I am glad you are with each other tonight.

In sympathy,
John

(John Schelling Pollock photo; Carkeek Park, Seattle WA; August 24, 2007)

August sucks

I didn't know that a crap anniversary could last a whole month. I thought the day/days around when you died would suck (and they do, or they sure did last year) but the whole frickin month is getting to me. It's like August 25/26 is looming ahead and I just want to run around those days, hop over them, avoid them. But I know I gotta plow right through.

I also didn't know that the pain would stay this sharp. The spaces of time between attacks get longer and longer, but when it hits it's like feeling it for the first time again. Ouch, ouch, fucking ouch. I miss you more than ever. Missing you has become embedded in my cell structure, my DNA, I don't know what.

Baby bro, this bites.

Love,
bswmyatt,mte