Roli

To you, Roli. now lying in the dirt in the hillside below Mirthios. Forever wed now to our beloved Crete. Your 2002 Christmas card made its way back to Alex and I a year and a half after she had sent it, and in Cate's words, it gutted us.

Trying to focus on my feet, I went to Zipp's and bought a bottle of Jim Beam so we could have "vun viskey" in your honor. Cried and smoked and drank, and kept waiting for it to get better, but to this day every time I think of you lying in that grave in the unforgiving Cretan countryside, I get a lump in my stomach and I want to scream.

We were supposed to meet you back there. After Amsterdam, it would have been necessary because I was such a scared little asshole, and you were patient as always; used to waiting in your wheelchair. You said you had nothing but time.

You wanted us to bring Phoebe to Crete. To get her off the ineffective dope she's pumped full of. Let her breathe Greek air and swim in the Mediterrenean sea for the cure no doctor thinks exists. After all, it finally cured you, and you're probably happy now, but look at the cost. To miss you so.

Phoebe was just starting to have seizures when you showed up in A'dam. The business was failing, and life was crushing us all. I cursed god every night, and I still hate his fucking guts for what he let happen. Only later did I figure maybe he couldn't do anything about it. Like everything in life, maybe he's overrated too.

I think of holding Phoebe for endless afternoons, while her mind slipped through my clutching fingers like fine sand. There are only a few grains left now in the palm of my hand, and three years later, she's a six year-old baby.

But you got to see her when she was still whole. She loved your chair, and she climbed up in your lap, so curious, so free of guile. She didn't understand the difficulty you overcame to come visit us there. And instead of telling those revolting cocks I worked with to go get fucked, I left you sitting and waiting while I continued the charade and made Death March 2000 back and forth along the Amstel to the twitching corpse that was e-City.

People who don't believe in angels must never have met one. Cold Amsterdam was the last place I held you, the same cold Amsterdam where you jumped eight stories down, trying to escape your demon, but she held on tight and steered you away from the cement and took you in for a landing on the soft mud, where instead of dying, you lost everything but your mind. You're the mirror image of my beautiful Phoebe angel, who in Amsterdam, lost nothing but hers.

Later in Minneapolis, I emailed you, but in '92 when our lines converged, you, me, Alex, Urs, and all the major and minor players, email was unknown, and we wouldn't have cared anyway. That was also before Phoebe, and before I forgot how to do everything but hope.

So you told me you wanted our voices to wrap around one another in the warm night breeze outside the taverna. You wanted me to understand that the people who were "normal" didn't know shit, and you wanted us to come home to the island and take Phoebe's future into our own hands. I didn't have the strength to step into that realm alone, even though I knew you would be waiting and that nothing bad could happen to us with you there.

Now your body lies in the dirt and your spirit mingles with the Meltemis, but without you there beside us, I doubt if I could ever return.