rip blair

 

Its been a tough week. One of my best friends died suddenly and without warning. He was my age, we were extremely close, and had traveled and adventured both together and with our wives (who are also best friends), and the reason why the two of them knew each other. I introduced them on a trip long ago.

Now he's gone and I can't talk to him or see him anymore and I feel lost and alone and scared by all that. And I still feel really numb. And all I can do at night when the kids go down is paint until I can't see straight. Try to make art that he would love, in the way that he loved it when he was alive and would visit my studio and buy paintings and we'd just sit and share.

Can what I make now do justice to his past memory. Can it make him alive the way his singing makes him alive when I listen to him. Its crazy how if you die and you are an artist, and then moreso a singer a musician, everything you leave behind is a recording. And not only a recording but something people want to listen to over and over again because its music. Its not home videos or short clips, but actual art made by the person externalizing everything about themselves.

We can visit that art, hear the ghost of a dead loved one. I have had other friends die, and I can't even really remember what they sound like because the last time I heard them they were alive and its been too long now..

But with Blair, I can play something from my phone. And it becomes all so real. And I'm tired of feeling the multitude but I guess that's better than nothing. And nothing would be worse. Thered be no art, no songs, nothing. So I can be thankful and know that time will pass and not get better but just be more of everything that is. I suppose writing about acceptance is a lot easier than feeling it, and it being true. Its a step? I hate the stages of grief. They've been with me for way too much of my life