“… let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going, no feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.”
There it was, tucked inside one of the first hand-written letters Adam sent me in the “snail mail.” A line from his favorite Rilke poem. The letter would eventually become the bottom rung in a soaring stack of hand-written letters, notes, poems and cards from Adam that sits bundled on the top shelf of my closet.
I think of that line, when I have the wherewithal to to sip on its wisdom.
I met Adam a few months before he wrote me that letter, poem included. I was a wee 24, hipster-fied (or trying to be) grad student biking the streets of Denver, reading the likes of Wendell Berry and Amartya Sen, working in low-lit cafés slinging whiskeys on weeknights. In other words, I was right up Adam’s alley.
One of those weeknights, Adam sat down at said café to write in a notebook over said whiskey and I somehow worked up the courage to lock with his dreamy eyes. What ensued was, well, pretty magical - doodling on napkins of the sailboats we would scurry away on together, sauntering down the middle of urban moonlit streets, buzzing to complex melodies from Radiohead on the record player, and musing endlessly of literature, community, meaning and farming - “the dirty life” as he called it.
It was dream, and he was magical, and I was swooning.
Over the next decade of friendship and love, I would come to find that Adam was no stranger to magic and dreaminess and swooning, and even his own poetry. He wrote me one about that first night we met and titled it “the pantry” where we had our first kiss. Swoon.
Hopelessly romantic, steadfastly meaningful, patient and undeniably tender - timeless qualities Adam modeled for all of us. He felt often like a refuge of softness and presence in a world that can be so cruel and constant.
We welcome it, if we can.
——————————————————————————————
My memories of Adam’s magic abound.
I remember the sweet smell of tussling around in a bed of mountain flowers with my favorite bearded lover one summer, or more.
I remember the way the sun made the metal fence light up like fireworks at the biker bar in the mountains outside Florissant, as Adam and I embarked on the, “How do you feel about me?” conversation. I remember the tears as I drove out of those mountains, falling to the rhythms of our favorite Colorado folk band’s latest album he burned for me (hand-label sticker and all). He spent the last 3 days encouraging me to write and nurturing passions I couldn’t even name, yet my answer was still “I don’t know.”
I remember the way his grin made me blush, even over the pixalated Skype squares, so many early morning sessions from Central America to Colorado. And damn those dreamy eyes. I remember the walk outside his cabin at dusk to watch the sun go to sleep over the ridge. I had a lot to say about changing the world; he had a lot to say about silence, and walking.
I remember the calm and cool held as my heart skipped a beat when he pulled out a letter I wrote to him about my grandmother five years prior. He read to me, pausing only to catch my eyes for dramatic effect - Look! This is your life!’ I swear he knew how to celebrate it more than I even did.
I remember the gleam in his eye the first time I saw Adam get high, his head and heart buzzing, surreptitiously, as if they’d finally found respite from all the feelings. That was the first night we had sex.
I remember how familiar he felt adventuring through hills and mountainsides around the world. One night, in August 2018, we sauntered through one of them in Boulder to watch the sunset, returning to the news my friend had finally met the end to his fight with cancer. I cried in Adam’s arms that night, and that would be the last time.
——————————————————————————————
But I remember too, Adam’s madness.
He experienced the world deeply, and we all reaped the benefits of that. But we paid the consequences too of what was sown.
I can’t sweetly grin at the buzz I get reading “the pantry” without also remembering the pain of watching his rollercoaster of emotions for the next several months, several years. After that first night, Adam and I scurried into an unfamiliar (to me) romance, and he showed me sides of himself, rather quickly, that I wouldn’t quite know how to name until later in my life - depression, addiction, love.
I remember being smothered with gifts and letters and attention maybe only the gods among us know how to receive. He wanted all of me and I’m not sure I could even define the parts of me willing to be given. My journal entry 2 months into the endeavor read, “I am scared of you.”
I remember Adam crying in my second story apartment the first time we broke up. The leaves tussling in a spring storm outside my window personified the vibration of anguish, anxiety and loneliness he tried to tell me. I don’t think he knew how to say it yet, but each time he fell in love - which was often - all that meaning got bottled up in one person. All the expectation and hope and fear for the world… maybe loving that person enough would concoct the right elixir to loosen the grip pain had on his mind.
I remember sitting in my backyard watching the sun set over a crumbling fence line telling us we’d both somehow become mortgage-paying adults. He shivered as he told me his capacity for love scared him, his sensitivity frightened him, his capital D Depression was something we should talk about. The way he navigated shame about codependency and addiction.
Adam never did anything lightly. If he called, he called 10 times. If he wrote a letter, it made you want to quit your job become a monk and read Neruda for the rest of your life. If he planned a day trip, he drowned every last detail in significance. If he made love, like really made love - the I swell when you swell, I hurt when you hurt kind of love - it made you cry. He felt all these quotidian emotions we know too well - hurt, loneliness, regret, worry, elation, connection, magic, madness. But he felt them all in swales, in cycled cyclones, daily.
Equanimity, harmony, balance. Timeless qualities, in their own right.
We welcome them, if we can. Adam could, but only for so long.
————————————————————————————-
Adam and I reignited a lover’s reunion his last summer. In hopeless romantic fashion we giggled our way through a date while harvesting peaches and making jam. Swoon. Later, snuggling after our foray into the bedroom, he stared straight at the ceiling when he told me about his first attempt at suicide. And then about his obsession with his last partner. And then about all the ways his brain just couldn’t accept the colossal confusion of love and wanting it all to have meaning.
And don’t we all want meaning? So what do we do when it’s just a (un)luck of the draw, or the “wrong timing”, or “just hasn’t happened yet.” Or worse, what if the only meaning to cling to is the beauty that we mean relatively quite little in the grand scheme of this brilliant spinning universe?
When I asked my therapist about how to care for (or if I even could) a partner who had attempted suicide, she scoffed. “Not a deal breaker,” she said. “Listen, so many more men than you think have been through this. Not a big deal, just part of the game.” Her bedside manner was… lacking to say the least.
While I’m all about de-stigmatizing and normalizing mental health struggles we all face, I cannot swallow the thought that any of this was “a game” for Adam. That summer, I realized just how long he had been suffering.
———————————————————————————————
And of course all these memories leave me wondering, what if.
What if I would have missed my flight that day at the biker bar. What if I would have said yes when he wanted to come to Guatemala. What if we continued to read each other poetry. What if I would have known better, when he said I was afraid of letting someone love me, and what if he was right? What if I would have sent him a letter, a hand-written letter, when he went back to rehab.
What if he wouldn’t have taken the last pill, or the last seven? What if he was found sooner. What if the ambulance arrived and revived him, then and there, on some country road I’ll never know.
What if we welcomed tenderness and thoughtful connection in this world, and accepted them equally along with their inescapable cousins intensity and… insanity?
Adam was my roudiest most unruly and most romantic love. And, Adam is one of my harshest memories, my most intensely difficult relationships. Navigating depression, and feeling, and sensitivity, and poetry, and pain, and forgiveness, and a sense of ‘missing’ and ‘longing’ and ‘coming home’ all at once.
——————————————————————————————
At a lake not far from me lay Adam’s ashes. Here lies his magic and his madness. His beauty and his terror.
He pours his way into my life, often. His insistent presence fogging up my window, whispering Hello love. Don’t forget the magic! Write letters. Talk about complexities. Walk the river paths. Hug someone, for too long. Dream about sailboats and farms. Feel it all. And love them all.
I admire a man out the window sipping black coffee in his Carhart, people watching free of distractions, and I feel Adam’s still charm. I write letters to give to a future adopted daughter in a little notebook Adam gave me, and I feel Adam’s patient blessing. I tussle through the waves of my own mental health struggles and finding family, trying very hard to let someone love me fully, and believe it, and I feel Adam’s encouraging smile.
Adam helped me to know the value of being easy on my own mind - my empathetic, over-thinking, heavy-feeling mind. In a way, Adam helps me forgive myself for my own beauty and my own terror.
In no small part because of Adam, I’m forging on in a life where I try to let everything happen to me. I live with a fierce conviction of the beauty of this life - everywhere, all around us, if we can be silent enough, if we can find the time to write about it, if we can take that extra cup of coffee, and probably a cupcake too. And, with more than a slight nod to Adam, I will not cower in the face of terror in this life, holding space for the madness that comes when we try to navigate the confusion, anxiety and loneliness that overwhelming beauty can bring.
It is ironically sobering, the cocktail of sweet and sour we all want to sip on to smooth out the in-betweens of this world. To calm our nerves when life tells us to quantify and pack up our experiences. My memories of Adam are boundless, spilling over the sides of the box I tried to put him in on my top shelf. Some of them framed in a picture on my wall, some of them flush through a smile on a quiet mountain hike, some of them cry out in a stupor of dreamy drunkeness. It is all of these things. Adam was all of these things, and life is too.
“Let everything happen to you, the beauty and the terror. No feeling is final, just keep going.”
