For Sean, Who Actually Read My Poetry

 You died.

I think two weeks ago now

But time doesn't feel real and hasn't since 2020.

Maybe before that. I have no idea when I stopped counting.

I remember when you found my blog. I never advertised it; it just existed - that hope for virality that will never come of age, honestly, because if you want to be viral you have to want to be viral and that obsession is a terrifying energy, isn't it?

But Sean found his way here.

He was a poet too.

And he talked to me on the phone one night about a script I wrote and told me honestly what he thought of it and I realized how important that was - to take a step outside of validation every once in awhile and let someone bludgeon it down with syntax error solicitation and betting on a better theme.

I sat on the steps with the phone at my ear feeling the stab, stab, stabs of critique I didn't care for and wishing for a cigarette, but my son was sleeping in the next room and I didn't want to wake him

How the hell did you die without me knowing you had cancer?

How the hell...

I hadn't spoken to you in years, actually.

I know. It's my fault.

the fucking planet

the fucking vaccines

the fucking masks and the fucking world turning and fucking trying to ride a wave between leftist and liberalism to just keep on surviving, right?

One time you told me that I couldn't have a healthy and balanced life because I wasn't trying to have a balanced life, I was trying to tell a good story.

Jesus Christ

I have never felt more seen.

How...

I think I hid after that

From you

From the Truth

From being Known

Out here broadcasting my wish for someone to see me and simultaneously screaming internally because you lifted some curtain that I wasn't ready to look under

What I wanted

What you saw

That fear...

How the fuck...

How 

Hearing you were dead I knew something selfish about myself was staring back at me in your partner's post about it - I didn't bother to ask you...

You sat at the screening of the last film we worked on together and you asked me where the footage was that we'd shot the 14 hour night - the footage I used for the promo and not the final product and you had that disappointed gut punch where someone pulled the rug out - that firm belief that I was better than this and I couldn't face that ever again.

It wasn't about you.

It was never about you.

Like I'm writing this poem and making it about me, aren't I? I can't help myself. 

You unearthed that

I can't stop telling stories and being in them long enough to answer the phone and you didn't feel safe to tell me... 

Did you die disappointed?

Goddamnit. 

It was all poetry.