Happy Birthday, Bart.

 

Today, or maybe tomorrow..actually, I think it is tomorrow...is the birthday of my friend Bart. I've written about him at least once before.  He died by suicide in 2015.

I'm glad he missed all the terrible losses that followed,.I'm glad he doesn't have to be here suffering, still.  But, damn, I miss him.  And it's not like we had been close in the last part of his life. I don't think I  had seen him in person or spent any time with him in years. He was just .. the first of our gang to die.  The first of my high school friends to go.   Another shiny beautiful piece of my past, gone. 

You always think you have more time; that if you get that once in a blue moon impulse to look up an old friend, there they'll be--married with two kids, doing something boring, or maybe amazingly successful, or maybe living an eccentric life that leaves you delighted to find out.  You always think that everyone you know or knew or loved is just 'out there' for a quick email, phone call, facebook message, and you take it for granted and you don't do it that often, because on some level you know you've grown apart over the years and it'd probably come across as wierd and creepy and stalkery...but you sometimes do that internet search and look at pictures and smile at the familiar face grown unfamiiliar with time and all the things you don't remember but somewhere  your heart remembers and your skin remembers, and so those feelings stay and stay.

His death was a shattering of that easy assumption, that silly illusion  that things and people will always be right where you left them, just as they were.  And shards of that shattering went into every single person he loved or who loved him, ever in our lives. 

Happy Birthday, Bart. My brain doesn't hold memories too well, but my heart holds this shard of pain and for your sake I will always love it  because it's proof I knew  you and because I loved you, and pain is a price I'm grateful to pay for all the laughter and fun we had together. Thank you for being my friend.