Now that's a song

In memory of Taylor

Dear Reader,

It’s been exactly a month since I received the worst phone call of my life so far, which is to say it’s been exactly a month since my daughter Wren called me, screaming in terror, to tell me that her 19 year old partner, Taylor, had unexpectedly died.

It’s hard to describe what the last four weeks have been: how grueling, how all-consuming, how holy, how profound, how destabilizing. This was not an experience I anticipated ever having to experience as a parent. There were so many things I have worried about, so many things I had imagined and dreaded and prayed against, but this was never one of them. I still don’t believe it happened. Walking alongside a child through a grief this enormous has taken every ounce of who I am, and every ounce still does not seem like enough.

It has been hard to conceive of how I would ever return to this space, to sit and put proverbial pen to paper again. Though I’ve always used writing to process every pain, every joy, every thing I have experienced, big or little, I have not been able to fathom how I would ever be able to write about this — or how I could write about anything else without having written about this.

In some ways, it’s because it’s not even mine to write about. The experience of supporting Wren through loss is, of course, but how could I start there without people even getting a taste of what she had lost?

And so before anything else, I wanted to share a little of what Wren herself has written. These three poems were part of a collection of poems she had started composing for Taylor called “Inventions,” and she wrote of them on her Instagram the day after Taylor died:

This has been a horrible 24 hours. It is sickening beyond words to try and speak, think, or breathe in a world that no longer has Taylor in it. The love I have for Taylor is a love beyond comprehension - I think our souls must’ve been entwined. They were soft and tough and silly and smart and so talented and so tender beyond all imaginable words. Taylor’s sweet voice has echoed through my mind every single second since we lost them, and, if I’m honest, I feel like I have nowhere to go and no one to be without them.

I was working on a collection of poems as a gift for the future, keeping it a secret so cheekily, as if we’d be together for a million years. I felt in my soul that we would be - I feel deeply betrayed by my own body for that, for giving me that feeling of longevity - but I loved (love) them infinitely and that forever felt tangible, then. These are not particularly good, smart, or public facing; they were for Taylor, and really only for Taylor. They will always be for my Taylor, but in light of them never getting to read most of these (with the exception of the very first chunk) I want those who loved them like I did to read them instead. They always had a thing about me being a writer; they thought it was so cool and I brushed it off, because I was shy or unsure or whatever. I regret that horribly. I should’ve written Taylor a hundred poems every single day.

Rest easy, meri pyaari. I love you across the universe, beyond every star the sky. I wish you were still here.

Quieting (02/02)

I would say this to you, but I’m not so good with words. If you read an ancient Chinese text, you often find the writers referring to a lost color, qīng, a word that fell out of use long ago. In Russian, they have two different words for dark blue and light blue. In Japanese, the words for green and blue are the same. All that is to say, we all see color differently, and everybody has their own ideas about it. But I only want to hear about it from you. I seriously don’t care what any polyglot has to say, what any other artisan or any historian claims. Brilliant, I only want to hear about any of it from you.

The word inventor comes from the Latin verb invenire, invent; ‘to find’.

Which I think makes being an inventor seem rather silly

And rather accidental.

But it couldn’t matter less what I think about inventing;

I have never made anything useful with my hands and

I do kind of expect planes to fly on their own.

Sometimes they do.

I have known a lot of miracles like that-

Of course I have-

I have known you.

I would say this to you, but I am not so good with words. If I could count every strand of hair on your head, I would, but there aren’t really enough hours in a night, so I have decided to count your eyelashes instead. Sometimes one of them will fall from you & and I like to catch them, like ladybugs on the tips of my fingers. You are not from around here - you so easily give me these summer charms that I am unfamiliar with. When we make eye contact for too long, your cheeks get sort of pink, like you are being burned a little by a special, internal sun, one that glows from within you - that kind of sun that makes the plants grow. Even my childhood vices leave me - I don’t even mind that I have to start counting all over again.

Wish. I am not so good with words. Make a wish.

you, who kisses my dry mouth, will discover why the sand is thirsty for the saltwater (3/11)

You are so beautiful

And you make such beautiful things!

Like a second God, or

One of those birds that makes its nest out of city scraps,

Creating stuff out of other, abstracted stuff that I am too dumb or too hungry to understand right now

But I’m smart enough to want them

And hungry enough to want them badly

You are so beautiful

(And they say you can’t eat dreams,

BUT!)

If there ever were a dream I could eat, I’d want it to be one you’re in

And maybe also in it, I’ve written a hundred books

And our bedroom is green.

And they say you can’t eat dreams

But I’ve done it fine enough so far.

My aunties always told me Ramadan is for the parts of you that no light ever reaches.

That the hunger breaches past what you want

into what you really want

And then, into what you need

Like if the ocean suddenly

parted so the sun could suddenly

reach the snails and the anglerfish and the big old isopods at the very bottom.

And I don’t know about that.

I am ashamed of myself in ways that the sun hasn’t reached,

In ways that the isopods will never experience

BUT!

I’ve never had a dream I couldn’t eat.

And there’s never been a day you haven’t been a dream of mine.

April and the Closed Eye (04/13)

The starlings are so loud this time of year,

Crackling and screaming,

Like summer hail falling on hot sidewalks and sizzling.

These birds are louder than grown people

Louder than the faraway thunder

And,

Though nothing is louder than the guns,

There are so many birds that I closed my eyes

And I almost couldn’t hear them.

I could still hear you, though, and I turned,

Saw you bright and beautiful as

the moon in a blue sky

(Although there really is no metaphor for it,

You are beautiful in the singular,

Here on the ground),

And said

“The starlings are so loud this time of year”.

And no, I wouldn’t call that a song,

But it’s a sound with a name.

Nothing is louder than the guns

But I put my head on your chest once

And I listened till my head filled up with the sound of water

So clear and sweet, you could’ve planted a forest

On the asphalt

And it would grow.

And I thought, now that’s a song.

You can read Taylor’s obituary here.