Payton.

Dear Payton,

    I wish I was saying all of this to your face.  I wish I didn't have to miss you in this unfixable way.  I wish you were here.  25 years wasn't long enough for us to tell you how much we love you.  I should've said it more.  I should've said it every time I saw you. 

I don't really even remember meeting you.  In my mind there are two different seasons: the one before you and the one after.  I don't think I ever chose to be your friend, I don't think you gave anyone a choice.  It was a gift you laid out on every single person that ever met you and Lord, aren't we lucky to have had that?  I think of the first time I met you and I can't help but smile.  You showed up at a stranger's house with your sister and walked in like we'd known you forever.  Everything about you is ringed in this hazy glow of laughter and light.  I don't remember a single time with you that wasn't wild, giddy chaos and unbridled joy.  The videos and photos I have on my phone are what I'm clinging to now.  I rewatch them and listen to your laugh and look and your smile and it feels me with this epic sense of loss and love and friendship.

    Yesterday we were all together again, but you weren't there.  Even when you left us, you brought us together.  I have to thank you for that too.  Thank you for letting me be part of the little family we built in your mom's kitchen in the middle of the night all those years ago.  Thank you for being so incredible that I could do nothing other than drive six hours to say goodbye.  Thank you for being so good that we all came back to remember who you were.  I hugged my best friend again for the first time in almost five years because of you and that was something I didn't even know I was desperate for until I got it.  I laughed, I cried, I remembered, I rejoiced, I mourned, because of you.  In your life you brought people together with joy and emotion.  And now you've brought us back in the same way again.  It feels a little unreal that you weren't there with us yesterday as we laughed and remembered.  It felt at times like you had just stepped out of the room and that you'd be right back.

    Payton, 25 years wasn't enough, but honestly, I don't know that any amount of time ever would've been enough.  You were that good, that bright, that joyous, that wise, that lovely.  Now you're in the place you wanted to fill up.  You're worshiping at the feet of Jesus who lived in you brighter than I've ever seen.  You're with your dad and with all the people I've loved and lost.  You're in the place we're all just a little more anxious to be so we can see you again. 

    Payton, I'll miss you for the rest of my life but gosh am I so thankful to have known you. 

Do you have monsters too?

 He's got a tenderness that I have craved and never been able to find.

There's something so incredibly gentle about the way he moves and speaks and something in me is drawn to it like a magnet.

There is a darkness in the back of his eyes, something brooding and alive that I recognize.  It's the kind of darkness that I've seen every time I look into the mirror.

It's a familiar kind of sickness that makes me want to reach out and touch him just to make sure he's real.

I wonder if a hand on his arm will pull him back down to earth the way it does me.  He seems to float above his body the way I do.  How does he come back into his skin, I wonder, how does he come back, and can he show me?

I'm not certain, but I think he might be fragile like me, stuck together with sheer willpower and an exhaustion that clings to his bones.

I don't know how to ask. 

I don't know how to ask if he has monsters haunting the quiet spaces in his mind like I do, but I think he does.  I don't think I need to ask.  I think I can see them.

Only people who have monsters in their heads can see them in other people and I don't think we are so different at all.

Do you have monsters in you too?

Does the skin you've been given feel like an ill-fitting disguise?

Does your soul feel the need to escape at all?

I can't ask him.  I can't ask anyone.  They're the kind of questions you swallow even though they feel like razor blades.

Does the darkness swallow you up sometimes?

Do you ever feel like you're disappearing?

Do you feel like you're floating away?

No, I can't ask.  But looking at him is achingly familiar.  It's like looking at a funhouse mirror.  Everything is the same and yet also somehow distant and distorted.

I think if we found our way together it would either heal us or destroy us once and for all.  Maybe that's enough of a reason to walk away.

But I don't want to.  I want to find the path that we could walk together.  I want to find a way to show him that I think we might have matching scars.  I want him to see me and to know that I can see him too.