My life is not better without him. Got it? There is no way to philosophize this loss. Ten years. There hasn’t been one minute particularly improved by his absence. He was, probably still is, the most brilliant writer I’ve ever read. Brilliant on the surface of his lines and brilliant from way down deep, the way a light might shine up from the bottom of the sea. Luminous. You’ll never read him now. His letter said he’s been putting his poems in a drawer. It’s simply that I miss him, and I would be insane not to. So I am listening to Kiko—in bits and pieces—for the first time since nineteen ninety-five. Except for the time Angel Face came on, in a shop in San Anselmo, and I had to leave, or faint or throw up. Because love is loss, because life doesn’t offer you replacement parts. What it offers are unromantic things, like the songs you loved each other by, are going to make you puke. Hence best avoided. I plan on avoiding them forever—easily done. One by one, I’ve let back into my life the music that meant something to me. Los Lobos, sad to say, I can nicely live without—and there it is, the two-part move: Simply Accept.
Fine with me. He can have Kiko—and Keith Richards, and the Stones. “My god,” I remember a friend saying, when she heard we were together, “He dances like Mick Jagger!” When in fact he danced like Mick Jagger only wished he could. What she meant was, Quiet, sick little you? By the end, it was clear to onlookers all, even me, who the forward one was, and who put their best work in a drawer. Why? I think that’s the point. Because that is how each of us really were, and still are. What extraordinary energy people put into living their fictional life! What’s wrong with the true one? Where I am not remotely shy—and he the sickly flower that required immense protection. People, things are mixed. Nothing slices down the middle. You will have things and love people and your next love will not per se be better. But don’t you adore the things one can rely upon. The appearance, every day, of the light. The way children, like a powerful garden, do grow. Me, I’m on the downhill side, and it’s rather sweet, and I rather love it. Because after all, this is precisely how it is.
One day last fall I bent over to pick a leaf off the deck, and the thought flashed through my head: Why, then, I am supposed to die, exactly like this dusty old leaf! Am I making any sense? Can you see the payoff in having no payoff? Am I mad to still feel the loss of the love of my life, years later?
Here’s my theory: Not on your bloody damn tintype. The losses—of romantic love, of health, of able-bodied freedom itself—are very much the same as the light. After the sun sets behind the houses to the west, the light off the Bay strikes a row of poplars two backyards away, and they stand for moments like glowing torches, this time of year. And then the sky darkens, night comes, and in the morning, everything starts all over again. I am telling you, the man I loved was a golden torch against the sky. I am telling you, I will never listen to Kiko again.
