Eight Years / Writing the Wrongs

It feels wrong in so many different ways. Wrong that so much time has passed now, that the world has changed so much in so many ways you wouldn't have believed and didn't get to see. Wrong that I'll be there (virtually) this Friday for the Bar Mitzvah of your youngest son and you won't. Wrong that I go sometimes weeks without saying your name out loud. Wrong that I still haven't been to your gravesite, that maybe I'm just still not ready to see that and be forced to accept the reality of it. One day soon, I think I will.

But time keeps moving, and I've been moving along with it. My fourth book will be out on shelves soon, so if you were here I'd get to say that you were wrong to think that if something was going to happen for us as writers, it already would have. I'm working on a fifth and sixth book now as well, and suddenly writing fiction again. The floodgates are open like never before and I'm just trying to keep up with all the ideas that are spilling out of my head now. I wish more than anything sometimes that I could share those with you, but that, it seems, is exactly what it cost to find myself here - having left off a life of trying to be some person I thought others wanted me to be in order to become who I was supposed to be after all. To have the faith in my vision. Losing you, my friend, was in so very many ways the catalyst for all the creative success I've had since. It feels wrong that I don't get to tell you that in some other form or format.

And now, somehow it's just a couple days shy of eight years since you've been gone. The world makes even less sense without you, if you can believe that, but I'll try to keep it connected to you, and you to it, the only way I know how. Writing the words to right the wrongs. As best I can.