An impossible year

This has been an impossible year. This is a year that should not have happened- this period of mourning and memories that slip into mind, inexplicable and without warning.

It's odd and disconcerting, this- that someone who hadn't been part of my everyday life for so very many years, in her absolute absence, should take up so much space in my mind. I think of Bayla once a week, at least. I'll be walking down the street and she'll pop into my head- something she said, something I would like to tell her. And it's odd, because when she was alive, I didn't think of her that often. After all, I knew I could call her; even see her occasionally. Our lives would still intersect. We were still both evolving and changing and meeting at points. If there were things to be told, they would be told. They could be stored up for that time when we sat face to face and recognized each other again in the people we were becoming. So she didn't take up so much space.

Now, she takes up so much space. Her laugh, that short bark of it, I miss it.

This is a mourning of her, but of also all the potential of her. If there is one moment I would rewrite, it would be today, a year ago. I would have just like to have the chance to say: Bay, Bay, look. We'll change, we'll be something else and we'll be the same and what I'd very much like is to know who you are for all these years to come. To sit down once a year, once every other year, and say, how are you? How is your family? Who are you today?

Any maybe there would be rifts. And maybe there would be disagreements. And maybe there would be pain. There already was and there would be again. But there would be other things as well- points of meeting, even if they would only be to reminisce about that time we made a fool of ourselves white-water rafting. But I believe we would have more, that even if the circumstances of our lives changed so much that we would be unrecognizable to our former selves, we would be recognizable to each other. People don't really change. We would always remain those rafting fools somewhere and isn't that a gift?

Bay, I would have like to have had the chance to say that, just once, before you left.

So I guess I miss you and I miss all the meetings we won't have and I miss the person you were and I miss the person you would become. 

It has been an impossible year. This was not within the possibilities of our lives. We should be meeting again. I have a lot to tell you.

There's no recipe today,just this. Just this.