Under a flat white box labeled in the corner love notes and other crazies 91-95 there is a plain shoebox. It just says cards/letters. What I am looking for is pictures.
I know my self enough by now to check through this box, it's just my style to shove pictures and movie stubs and what else I can only begin to imagine--quotes scribbled on the back of menus, parking tickets, wristbands from all-ages shows--amid what I would otherwise obliquely label cards/letters.
It's not Fannon I find first tho, it's Molly. And it takes my breath away. But that is for another story.
I am in the attic and it is hot. I dont come up here, ever, to look for anything. I packed this chest up in 2004 when I went travelling, and I have not been in it since 2007 when I added the box I was looking for today. It's for my keepsakes. Memory Lane: I used to expert in memories, swill them like Boones Farm and get all pissy drunk on them like a 15 year old does on cheap wine. But in 2004 I sold all my shit and downsized those scraps. Kept only what fit in this chest. I have now become an expert in this: letting go. Letting go letting go letting go.
And Fannon, you're the one who started that.
Ten years is a long, long fucking time. But so short. Today, ten years ago I was sleeping off a gnarly hangover in my old windowless room here at the Pines. I'd been arrested, again, and had called Jess up to celebrate my big last night out before I cleaned up my act one more time in order to get my family to shut the hell up. How arrogant we were in our youth. How thoughtless, and unaware...I'm pretty sure, Fannon, you changed that, too.
Cuddy called, and that was that. I didn't believe her at first. When I told Jess she started puking. It wasn't until I got Mudd on the phone though that I knew it was real. I could hear it in his voice, the way that sometimes, once, twice, three times in your life, a person can sound exactly the way you've always dreaded having to feel. I had to tell Jeremiah. I had to fucking tell Jeremiah!! He was on base, still in the Marines. So Cuddy, I always understood why you couldn't look at me after that. It took Jere two years almost to look at me again.
I know my self enough by now to check through this box, it's just my style to shove pictures and movie stubs and what else I can only begin to imagine--quotes scribbled on the back of menus, parking tickets, wristbands from all-ages shows--amid what I would otherwise obliquely label cards/letters.
It's not Fannon I find first tho, it's Molly. And it takes my breath away. But that is for another story.
I am in the attic and it is hot. I dont come up here, ever, to look for anything. I packed this chest up in 2004 when I went travelling, and I have not been in it since 2007 when I added the box I was looking for today. It's for my keepsakes. Memory Lane: I used to expert in memories, swill them like Boones Farm and get all pissy drunk on them like a 15 year old does on cheap wine. But in 2004 I sold all my shit and downsized those scraps. Kept only what fit in this chest. I have now become an expert in this: letting go. Letting go letting go letting go.
And Fannon, you're the one who started that.
Ten years is a long, long fucking time. But so short. Today, ten years ago I was sleeping off a gnarly hangover in my old windowless room here at the Pines. I'd been arrested, again, and had called Jess up to celebrate my big last night out before I cleaned up my act one more time in order to get my family to shut the hell up. How arrogant we were in our youth. How thoughtless, and unaware...I'm pretty sure, Fannon, you changed that, too.
Cuddy called, and that was that. I didn't believe her at first. When I told Jess she started puking. It wasn't until I got Mudd on the phone though that I knew it was real. I could hear it in his voice, the way that sometimes, once, twice, three times in your life, a person can sound exactly the way you've always dreaded having to feel. I had to tell Jeremiah. I had to fucking tell Jeremiah!! He was on base, still in the Marines. So Cuddy, I always understood why you couldn't look at me after that. It took Jere two years almost to look at me again.
We drove to Keith's, Shannon had a little boy walk in on her when we stopped at the Taco bell bathroom in Easton on the long drive from the beach. Ashleigh and Maura were there, and Hupman. I just walked over to Hupman and fell in to his arms and we did not say a thing. It helps to tell, to talk about it now. Last month I saw John again, all these years later, at least 10. And this time as soon as we saw each other we just started to cry...
People dont talk about death. Dont talk about how sudden, unexpected, and especially the untimely ones rip your muscles out, tear apart your very flesh. Seperate the tendons of your self, so that ever after the very beating substance of your self you become wickedly aware of. Like one day you dont know about that, the fabric of yearning and skin and blood and tissue that makes you up, then when it tears so violently and it's all you're left to contend with, well then what? Then you know forever, and from now on it's your job, your choice: am I brave enough to re-mend? Do I have the strength and courage to start to sew? But how most of us, in the aftermath, dont even know that's our choice. We just let the scar tissue build up, and stay numb in that quiet little section of our life...
Fannon we loved you so, so much. You were the fiber at our center, did you know that? You were the one who held us all together. The late night creeps by your house. You'd still be up, watching infomercials, eating nachos or popsicles and bottled sodas crazy ass paranoia eyes darting side to side. You always knew where the party was. The card games, spades and high stakes at Listro's or under your back deck. Parties in the basement at Michelle's, or back of the pizza shop just to say whutup. Backroad driving in the tinted windowed lowrider--remember the time you got stuck in the mud on that farm? And Hupman tried to get you out? And like everyone showed up, just to hang out there? Chilling in beach chairs and shit? How bout all those late ass nights we kept up my mom? My poor, poor mom! The time we told dad, in town for one of his weekend jaunts, that we were having a couple people over to say goodbye to Maura when she switched from Spalding to Arundel and we packed my basement full of heads? And blunt smoke, and dad didn't even know (cars were to the top of Tall Timbers for christ's sake!!!) until Davis showed up at the front door with a thirtypack on his shoulder. Back door dumbass, it was a backdoor party duhhhh. What about those field parties, what the hell was that place called remember the bonfires we had there? The six-foot bong? It was that one summer, no weed anywhere just acid I'm telling you it's a wonder any damn one of us are even half-sane. Wow and sixth street, and the years after that. Bass bass bass thug thug thug. The morning you were STILL UP, after Jess and I got kicked out of Dave Swann's at 7 am for waking everyone up and we came to your place and you were like, Truckstop? Hell yea!! And on the drive you randomly busted out with a deep alto version of Strangers in the Night! Sinatra dude? God damn you made me laugh. I have so many memories, so fricken many. I covered them up though, got clean that year for good right after you died and resigned myself to never looking back. Thank god for Facebook tho, and I guess, shyly, self-consciously, all these years later--thank god for time, and a little bit of growing up.
You ever hear this saying? I sure loved the good ol days but I'm sure glad there gone? I think it's a lyric. Whatever. I agree, mostly. But I think in general naming any time period as the best ever, or even the worst or whatever isolates it so you cant really integrate the blessings of the you that you used to be--and therefor praise and enjoy the you who you are today. The me of today, developed in strong, awesome ways over the years happened by looking back on a crew of amazing, wild, funny, nutty characters who still live in me, and who are guideposts to a time back then of innocence and wildness~~when I lived in the bliss moment unafraid. That sweet fresh time of timelessness when it's all possible, when you dont know about the fragility of your heart yet cuz your so busy wildly living out of it. Right out of its center. Life is amazing, there's so much, there's just so much to get to do, to be, to live and experience. And you lived an amazing time with all of us, and also started me on that tip of appreciating my life Brian, first by closing my heart, but more importantly, in the last several years, by forcing me to re-open it, and investigate the secret treasures I had hidden there. The old bones of who I was, they actually have led me wholly and fully to the kick ass woman I get to be today.
I just wish the hell you were still here to get to be the man you could've been, and to see us all kick ass as we still are now. I miss you Brian. I love you, I know I speak for us all when I say we all do. Here's one last memory: You had long hair, to your chin. You were a pizza boy and it was closing time and you had to mop, and Scotty put on Pink Floyd. And you picked up the fucking mop and started playing it like a guitar. Which was funnier, your hair flopping all over the place or the fingers of the wet mophead, sloshing water everywhere? I still pray for you brother and I'm thinking of you today.
People dont talk about death. Dont talk about how sudden, unexpected, and especially the untimely ones rip your muscles out, tear apart your very flesh. Seperate the tendons of your self, so that ever after the very beating substance of your self you become wickedly aware of. Like one day you dont know about that, the fabric of yearning and skin and blood and tissue that makes you up, then when it tears so violently and it's all you're left to contend with, well then what? Then you know forever, and from now on it's your job, your choice: am I brave enough to re-mend? Do I have the strength and courage to start to sew? But how most of us, in the aftermath, dont even know that's our choice. We just let the scar tissue build up, and stay numb in that quiet little section of our life...
Fannon we loved you so, so much. You were the fiber at our center, did you know that? You were the one who held us all together. The late night creeps by your house. You'd still be up, watching infomercials, eating nachos or popsicles and bottled sodas crazy ass paranoia eyes darting side to side. You always knew where the party was. The card games, spades and high stakes at Listro's or under your back deck. Parties in the basement at Michelle's, or back of the pizza shop just to say whutup. Backroad driving in the tinted windowed lowrider--remember the time you got stuck in the mud on that farm? And Hupman tried to get you out? And like everyone showed up, just to hang out there? Chilling in beach chairs and shit? How bout all those late ass nights we kept up my mom? My poor, poor mom! The time we told dad, in town for one of his weekend jaunts, that we were having a couple people over to say goodbye to Maura when she switched from Spalding to Arundel and we packed my basement full of heads? And blunt smoke, and dad didn't even know (cars were to the top of Tall Timbers for christ's sake!!!) until Davis showed up at the front door with a thirtypack on his shoulder. Back door dumbass, it was a backdoor party duhhhh. What about those field parties, what the hell was that place called remember the bonfires we had there? The six-foot bong? It was that one summer, no weed anywhere just acid I'm telling you it's a wonder any damn one of us are even half-sane. Wow and sixth street, and the years after that. Bass bass bass thug thug thug. The morning you were STILL UP, after Jess and I got kicked out of Dave Swann's at 7 am for waking everyone up and we came to your place and you were like, Truckstop? Hell yea!! And on the drive you randomly busted out with a deep alto version of Strangers in the Night! Sinatra dude? God damn you made me laugh. I have so many memories, so fricken many. I covered them up though, got clean that year for good right after you died and resigned myself to never looking back. Thank god for Facebook tho, and I guess, shyly, self-consciously, all these years later--thank god for time, and a little bit of growing up.
You ever hear this saying? I sure loved the good ol days but I'm sure glad there gone? I think it's a lyric. Whatever. I agree, mostly. But I think in general naming any time period as the best ever, or even the worst or whatever isolates it so you cant really integrate the blessings of the you that you used to be--and therefor praise and enjoy the you who you are today. The me of today, developed in strong, awesome ways over the years happened by looking back on a crew of amazing, wild, funny, nutty characters who still live in me, and who are guideposts to a time back then of innocence and wildness~~when I lived in the bliss moment unafraid. That sweet fresh time of timelessness when it's all possible, when you dont know about the fragility of your heart yet cuz your so busy wildly living out of it. Right out of its center. Life is amazing, there's so much, there's just so much to get to do, to be, to live and experience. And you lived an amazing time with all of us, and also started me on that tip of appreciating my life Brian, first by closing my heart, but more importantly, in the last several years, by forcing me to re-open it, and investigate the secret treasures I had hidden there. The old bones of who I was, they actually have led me wholly and fully to the kick ass woman I get to be today.
I just wish the hell you were still here to get to be the man you could've been, and to see us all kick ass as we still are now. I miss you Brian. I love you, I know I speak for us all when I say we all do. Here's one last memory: You had long hair, to your chin. You were a pizza boy and it was closing time and you had to mop, and Scotty put on Pink Floyd. And you picked up the fucking mop and started playing it like a guitar. Which was funnier, your hair flopping all over the place or the fingers of the wet mophead, sloshing water everywhere? I still pray for you brother and I'm thinking of you today.
3 comments:
I miss and Love you Brian more than you will ever know!!! I think about you often still to this day and wish things had turned out different !
With all my love, Shannon
Damn, Kel, and there's the eulogy you weren't ready for at the time. Ready now. There's no time where he is.
Beautiful.
heartfelt and tender.
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