can we hold hands one more time
absent mindedly moving our fingers in small circles
the sun's coming up
starting to creep onto the wall
your chest rises and falls with each breath
i can feel your heart beating
the light is going to bring an end to this
to this little world
this tiny pocket of happiness
oh how none of us ever expected this to happen
did we?
it makes it harder
when it happens suddenly
but i don't know if love has ever happened slowly for me at all
Tag: life
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i am lying here
looking up at the sky
hearing the winds blow through leaves
and i cannot keep my focus
as i look upward
past the atmosphere and the galaxies
i am lifting lifting lifting
away and gone
like the loss of life
and the promise of meaning
tomorrow
we always pretend that there is some reason
why we are here
between
the living and the dead
but i know now the only reason
is so that we may love what is gone
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i watched episode 9, season 1 of game of thrones. for those who don’t know, this is the episode where eddard stark is beheaded in front of his two daughters and all the nosy do-nothings of king’s landing.
this episode filled me with immense grief and horror.
it was also the moment where i realized this was one of the greatest stories ever told by a human.
i recently started rewatching the show and came to that episode just the other day. one day before the 15th anniversary of it airing. it aired on june 11, 2011.
on june 11, 2026 we had to put down our beautiful baby cat. he was of course, not a baby by any means, at 15, but he was and will always be a baby. you know what i mean if you have ever had to put an animal to sleep.
the day i watched this live on hbo, 15 years ago, i never would have imagined that 15 years in the future, i would have felt such a loss in real life.
and i know that our cat, his name was tucchi, is no eddard stark. but the loss is no less poignant.
i’m still in those intense waves of grief, and i imagine i will be for some time.
i no longer need to make sure there’s room for him on the couch, feed him his favorite wet food at night, cuddle and hold him while i sleep, pet him when he butts his head against my leg, or kiss him hello when he greets me at the door, but all of those missing moments have now created an emptiness in me that i don’t know how to fill.
i suppose they won’t ever be filled. maybe they will. in different ways. only time will tell.
all i know is that 15 years ago when i sat sobbing on my couch watching eddard stark get beheaded—i had no idea that 15 years from then i’d also have to feel the immense loss of my favorite baby boy. sobbing in a different way, for a cat who i loved so much and who loved me in ways i cannot possibly ever measure up to.
i love you so much, tucchi and i am going to spend the rest of my life trying to do good by you. whatever way that manifests.
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i’m not patriotic, and not because i hate the states or anything.
i mean, okay lets be so for real — i do not like the direction and path this country has fallen into but patriotism seems like such a silly thing when the world is so big.
being brought here as a baby and always being aware of the fact that i could have just as easily grown up on the other side of the world, i’ve never felt any sense of attachment to like… anywhere i’ve been? i don’t really know how to describe it. always loved moving. shaking things up. collecting stories.
i think the closest i’ve felt to loss when it comes to a “place” is when my parents sold the house i spent the majority of my youth growing up in. it was our third home at that point, but it’s where we had stayed the longest. it was always a constant in my life. i could always count on going home for the holidays and being inside, all cozy in front of the fire.
it seems silly to me to feel patriotism for … what? land? a place? arbitrary human-made borders on the land masses that managed to break through the ocean?
i associate patriotism with over zealous xenophobic people. proud people. unflinchingly accepting ideals proposed by the government. maybe that’s what the states have done to my brain. or maybe i did it to myself.
i would really enjoy if my feelings toward the word changed, but i fear it might be a while until that happens. i’d like to feel proud. i’d like to know that we’ve done the right thing; protected people. shown love to immigrants. but i don’t know if that is possible. time and action will tell.
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listen, we don’t do it anymore. and i miss it terribly. i’m also going to write about this one specific thing even though there are many family traditions that exist in our family.
we would always go to my aunt’s house, who was really my mom’s cousin, but like — you’re not going to call someone “mom’s cousin” so “aunt” it was — and we’d gather around the piano in a warm cozy house all decorated for christmas every year. there was a gorgeous twinkling tree with a beautiful train track set up around the base. i loved train sets as a kid and i always wished i could shrink myself down in size so i could ride them.
there’d be drinks and food and quality time with cousins and other family members you hadn’t seen in a while. one time a family member told me, “hey, i just want you to know it’s okay to be gay.” i was a 25 year old man at the time who had come out in 9th grade but i looked at him and said, “oh wow, thank you.”
the packet of christmas carols that was distributed was the same every year, but sometimes there would be new carols added! the songs we sang were always in the same order, pages worn with use and time, but lovingly so. staples sometimes barely keeping the pages together.
my aunt would sit at the piano bench as we all squished into the sofas, armchairs, or if you were young like me, the best spot on the floor. we’d go through the songs like a ritual, ushering in the holiday spirit as best our little voices would allow.
there was always one song where my mother would ad-lib a line in that was not in the caroling booklet. the song in question was called “nuttin for christmas” which as i type that seems absolutely insane — but my mother would always add in the line, “boy was she mad!” in an emphatically dramatic manner. it always caused my cousin and i to make direct eye contact and cringe.
every year my mother continued to do this. over. and over. my cousin and i looking forward to it more and more each year, until it became so deeply entwined in my own feelings about christmas spirit that i was no longer able to differentiate between the two.
we don’t have these caroling parties anymore and i miss the joy and magic the adults in our lives worked so hard to give us.
it’s almost like santa’s jovial “ho ho ho” to me now but if i close my eyes, travel back in time and remember how everything used to be, i can still hear my her voice singing out, “boy was she mad!” into a room so full of love and happiness.
tales from the cove 