Letter.

Hi, mijo.

I don’t know where to begin—should I just bring you up to date on what I’ve been doing? Is it okay if I just ramble for a bit?

You know, I had a fanciful idea today that I wanted to tell you about. I thought maybe from where you sit…up above all…that maybe you move clouds to change the weather for me, to show me sun. But it has been raining and raining, and so then my hope gets submerged in the dark ink I use to write about all the ways things should have been different.

Then, I think maybe you are an astronaut in reverse, visiting earth from up above. Maybe you are entering this orbit to whisper some things and then returning home to your clouds again. I guess I think that if you are faceless here where I live still, perhaps it is your secret voice I hear on occasion, when you are visiting and I most want to hear you.

(It is February and it’s cold. You’ve been gone for weeks now. Where have you gone? I miss you a lot and I can’t call you. Are you trying to talk to me? Is the sound of the white wind in the frosty air you? Are you embodying the wind and are you whispering words of love and words of encouragement as you watch me stagger and struggle.)

Well, anyway, enough about me, how are you?

I think about you all the time, Super Chuper. You’ve left no body here, but you strangely figure so grandly into every space: dreamspace, headspace, heartspace. You’ve done it! You’ve transcended your mortality, kiddo. You’ve somehow become more than alive. How large you are (ha ha, remember that? “You’re tall.” Remember how people would ask you every day…for decades…how tall you were? We laughed but I don’t remember why it was funny?).

You occupy so much space, in the gestures I see in others, in their social ills…lighting up a cigarette now…or in their human foibles, throwing one’s head back to laugh now, offering a sympathetic smile now. Or maybe you’re just in the thoughts of those who loved you, that we can’t stop having, and in the memories we can’t stop replaying. I have this one memory, I love it, I remember I was trying to–

Oh oh, wait. Chip! Call me back! I need to go now. I hear the precious wind again and I need to listen to what it is saying—

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