Happy Birthday, Icarus

When he rose to adulthood I reviled him, judged from a false high. He was on drugs and unemployed and cadging money from our family, and this angered me: your average work-obsessed, unaware American. And thus the last hundred interactions I had with him were merely one-sided indictments: iniquities and unctuous penalties from an impenitent know-it-all who was also mooching and stoning and coasting and comatosing with substances. The differences between us were superficial, but we lived in a superficial country, and so I was deemed superior. But because he’s now dust at the bottom of the Atlantic, I can no longer impart just how sorry I am, how I have payed and payed to carve my pain into something pure and eternal. He can’t see the lessons I have learned and earned and strived and failed for every day: that to quietly judge will yield only isolation and pain, that to attempt superiority is to plunge.

But I can tell you. You — the big breathing you, the one who still may infinitesimally change the immediacies around us. These gasping gaping word-wounds, at their very best, can teach you to treat every conversation as the last, to hold in your mind’s heart the knowledge that you should never bury a feeling before you bury a boy. Some day soon I too will exist only as ocean-floor offal, and that is why I will try to be kind even to those I despise.

And so I write and leave the stain of myself for all the other lost little brothers still out there, still grasping for their own breathy messages: Say it. Say it. Scream it, even if tears fall. You’ll be right here, and so will I, if we but try to sing as we fly.