Sunday, April 2nd

and I love her

We got to talk to everyone today, my mom said over the phone, satisfactorily, meaning, by ‘everyone,’ all of my brothers. 

There are pinto beans stewing with a smoked hamhock and collards from the farmer’s market, and Susanna’s Allison Roman’s cornbread is finished baking and keeping warm in the oven, perfuming the apartment with buttermilk and corn.

I told Susanna that a friend of mine had died. I’d kept it in for a day. We weren’t too close—time would have had it otherwise—but she was the closest person to me, at my age, that had ever died, and so I felt the loss more intensely than intimacy’s lack demanded. Earlier, I prayed for the ability to cry. The prayer was answered when I told Susanna.

It had also been a beautiful day, the kind that slows down enough to feel how much you love the person across the room, enough to get up and go to them. A one-pot, more-time-for-you sort of day. I still feel like crying — when it rains.

The beans were very good, the cornbread perfect for them. Susanna asked for a song to start a playlist. I gave her ‘Jealous Guy,’ which had already played. Between the meal and this writing, John Lennon’s Look At Me came on. Then, Billy Joel’s She Always a Woman and George Harrison’s Run of the Mill, both for a second time.

The news about my friend came between helpings. Grief bubbles and makes it hard to eat. It’s as hard to cry about two things at once as it is to not cry once for both.

Simon and Garfunkel’s Kathy’s Song came on. I must’ve sang that song twenty times in a row after a big solo mushroom trip in San Jose del Pacifico. I remember thinking that if I ever died too young, I’d like Kathy’s Song to play for whoever comes together in their grief, that they might know in it’s listening that I missed nothing.

Have You Ever Seen the Rain is on, and I’m thinking about my dead friend, about how much I love the woman in the kitchen doing dishes, about the discomforting feeling brought on by the dual arrival of gladtidings and the worst news.

Susanna had held my head when I couldn’t hold it back anymore. I wanted to laugh, make a joke, talk about the food, but it was only the time to cry. But the beans were good, and the cornbread too, and tonight we’ll make love if I can finish crying. And now playing—

She gives me everything and tenderly

The kiss my lover brings, she brings to me. 

And I love her