Forward

I lost a friend recently.

He was a fellow traveler on this journey. Only his baggage grew too heavy and he fell behind, or made a pitstop, or perhaps a detour. I'm not quite sure how or why it happened. My initial reaction was that of one punched hard in the stomach: the breathlessness, the valiant attempt to take in oxygen, the failure, the panic. Once I recovered my breath, the words of Robert Frost drifted to mind: "nothing gold can stay." I felt sorry for myself, and cried and mourned and railed against this life, asking why it is that the beautiful moments must be so fleeting, and why in their leaving there must be so much pain. Then there was the awful realization: There is no way I can go forward alone. I don't have it in me, it was in him all along, or in us together.

Then: I don't want to go on without him.

I was overcome with the desire to lay my body down, nestle my head in the leaves, and give up. Not write this, or anything. I was flooded with the desire to trudge home to my comfortable little brokenness and shut the door, lock it behind me, and stay. But then, like a flash of daylight through the aspen, I remembered that the journey began long before this one leg, and I began this journey alone after all, as did he, always knowing that we would probably end it alone as well. The words of a wise and passionate poet rang in my ears: "freedom is won alone, or not at all." Perhaps no truer words were ever written.

It occurs to me that in the scheme of things, this friendship has been a bit like a soft bed, a warm fire, a nourishing meal in the course of these travels. Our time together adds up to a handful of truly great thoughts, amazing connections, moments of stark clarity, of pure beauty, of much needed hope. It occurs to me that perhaps we were not meant to share the journey but to spur each other on in our separate paths. Or perhaps we were just a checkpoint, a respite, on this long, difficult venture toward becoming our truest, best selves. I don't know. There is so much I don't know. But I do know that I have been changed somehow by those moments, that connection. No one can steal that, twist or diminish it, as hard as one may try. The ways in which we have bettered each other, strengthened each other, reflected each other's greatness, are ours to keep and use as we need, going forward. Ever forward.