Burnt Out Torchlight Along The Pathway.

"I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps 'Oh look at that!' Then - whoosh, and I'm gone... and they'll never see anything like it ever again, and they won't be able to forget me - ever."

It's an old Jim Morrison quote. It was how a young, energetic, delightfully charming young man described himself on more than one occasion. He could recite that quote verbatim. It meant that much to him. It was prophetic, just a little. Oddly disturbing to be reading it tonight in light of what has happened. From the fiery died red hair to the crooked smile, to the intensity with which he approached his short life, there was nothing about him that ever said inconsequential. There are a thousand 22 year old boys who are interchangably typical and completely forgettable.

Why take away a man who had so much more to live and so much to give? Why? Just to make the world a darker place, to extinguish a light that we enjoyed decorating our world. That makes no sense. A reality check perhaps? To show us how perishable we really are? To make us feel unsafe and to remind us once more that everything in life is temporary and leave me feeling again that everyone leaves my life before I'm ever ready to let them go? It's the bitterness and the hours talking. It's the anger beginning to set in. Logically I know all that.

I remember the last time I saw his face. I was slow dancing barefoot around the livingroom, the only music in my head, my beloved peanut tucked up under my chin. It's the sweet spot... the one that makes me feel whole and brings me peace, much the same way his mother must have once upon a time felt about him. He was watching us. Not staring, just taking it all in. I wonder now what he must have been thinking in that nearly 23 year old brain of his.

I think sometimes that he was considering his future. The one he had planned with the wonderful young woman who loved him dearly and deeply. The one he hopefully someday would learn to love just as much. I know he had that in him. It's just sometimes slower coming in men than young women. I know they dreamed together of their future. She would tell me once in a while of lying in bed next to him, feeling whole, wishing, hoping, planning, scheming and dreaming of the next right thing for them. They loved each other now.... and she always expected to love him 20, 30 years from now. She's gonna make it... he never will.

I said to him as we shared a moment before leaving "be safe." He looked at me with his head tipped sideways and that impossibly crazy hair hanging in his face. I ran a finger down the side of his face, took his chin in my hand and kissed his forhead. He ducked his head a little. It wasn't his time to be thinking about growing up, acting with a little healthy caution. Timing is such a personal thing. It's everything. I know it sounded odd coming from me but we talked for a moment. He listened earnestly, intently... but in the end it didn't matter. I keep seeing things. Little snatches of little scenes over and over in my head. All of them dark. None of them positive. Just really an impression of something unsettled and negative around him, of some impending pain I wished I could spare him. And nothing concrete that would satisfy him or me for that matter. I wish I could have explained it better to him, but I don't really understand it myself. It's not like there is evil music playing as the woman creeps down the stairs to the cellar in a bad horror flick and everyone in the theater is yelling at her not to go down into the cellar. I wish it were that simple.

It happens sometimes. An impression or an image that comes along at the worst possible time when I have no time to think or analyze it. And I hate that I get a little bit here and there and no good idea of what it is that I'm really sensing. I feel cheated that I could not see enough to tell him to stop, sit back and watch from the sidelines for a while.

With him I chalked it up to the craziness that is being 22 and living on your own, making sometimes poor choices and behaving like a kid. But honestly no more so than any other young man his age, living with his talant and his gifts. When I saw him perform on stage I was captivated by his presense and his ability to hold the room. It was raw talent, a little rough around the edges and in need of refinement, but clearly the gift was there. He was a good kid. Really. Seriously. He worked hard, had good relationships with his parents and loved his girl. And he was like a hummingbird in some ways. The way Nathanial Hawthorne described one anyway. If you sat still long enough and watched, he just might alight upon you. And you were in for a treat when he did.

And then one Sunday he made the worst possible decision of his short life, experimented one too many times with stuff better left to the street junkies and wound up dead at the bottom of an apartment complex swimming pool. Quietly, effortlessly and unintentionally dead. What he left behind is far more complex and painful than I'm sure he ever thought it would be. And no one can explain to me why or why not one of us who loved him had the power to stop it.

What good is a gift if you're only allowed the part of it that frustrates the hell out of you and not enough to do anyone any good?