thank you for coming. showing up is the hardest part!

it could only start here, the pulp fiction of it all. changed all the names except his. 

Kemp

I should have been more specific.

​

lightning strikes and a scar is made. I can’t see the marks left on my back from falling off that roof but I know they’re there. we can start with the static electricity tho..

​

you and I were like two sharks in a tank, standing at our posts in that tiny restaurant driving imprints of traction to our circular routes of host and bartender. standing no more than 10 feet from each other all summer, we were bound for a destinous impact. I remember thinking how well you fit into a setting..you wore all black as a uniform for your life, it was apparent. this kind of deliberate choice marked you as someone well in their own realm completely, on sight. the way you carried tall energy and shapeshifted your Look cloaked you. if someone wasn’t paying attention, they’d very well miss it. I don’t recall who broke our ice first.. I just remember we met and then we were. we clearly thrilled each other, fireworks set off that brought all 15 other employees in for routine medicinal warmth. unstoppable force meets immovable object well before we knew how to harness it into the kind of alchemy we’d long craved.

​

no one can tell you how surreal it is to meet someone who is also your best friend’s best friend and explain to you a version of this mutual you always knew but may not have experienced in the near proximity way. Jingo called you a goblin and I couldn’t agree more. the night would turn.. we’d come alive to light cigarettes, dance in the center, narrow our eyes on a pool cue and each other. i loved our friendship in this dimension so much. in totality. Kemp protected us with a singular gesture. we got into a habit of breaking the rules and making a mockery of decorum. we didn’t give a shit about heights…that was always our problem, together or apart.

​

I’d known (aka read) that fast and wild summers to be the kind where a girl meets a guy and he beats her into silence till her family notices. young adult novels expected me to know what packing a bowl meant. I had to life-google that shit (i.e. wait for it to reveal itself to me over time) yet I knew exactly what the fuck was up when Kemp asked me if I wanted to join ‘em in a cross country move to Alburqurque New Mexico. I knew cos I knew I wasn’t ready. instead I gave them a parting gift gameboy I figured I’d probably collect again by being their neighbor someday. instead I got a letter returned to me after they’d died before hitting 30. careful with the intentions ’n signals, ya’ll. Kemp teaches me specificity’s power every single day.

​

any question I would ask of Kemp would be followed by an interior image drawn up most resembling the unexplored parts of a video game map going from black to grey. clarity led to more questions. so matter-of-fact in the arena of mystery. he’d worked at Aquarian, this local shop holding spiritual totems and crystals for all the local gays to build their first altar with. I didn’t have one then, my first glimpse into the divine spiritual holding space beyond a gravestone or church was the small parcel of mystery objects Kemp carried around. I wasn’t allowed to know what was in it—nobody was. “it’d ruin it’s effectiveness.” simple.

Kemp knew how to fight, too. which in turn instantly made me feel like I knew, too. :) lol, transitive property. one particularly critical moment of separation between us was the night the noodle head BMXers from nitro circus came to visit our restaurant. bright red expensive snapbacks, repetitive triple shots of dark rum followed by our highest ABV pours of stout. they babysat the most public table for hours, talking a whole lot of shit and getting extremely drunk. I remember three things the most: getting the main starlet to give me his hat shortly after he sloppily stuck his foot out to show me his inked confederate flagged foot (what can I do about it now? he’d said. it’s my heritage!) not long before his buddy started harassing my coworker directly. I challenged him to stop it, the commotion of this shut the entire party down. I thought about how stupid that had been of me, despite my morals in the right place—simply no way I could have backed up the force I’d threatened with these grown ass men. I was lucky it ended there, everyone walking away…that dumb red hat still on my head and my colleague grateful for the support. I thought back to when Kemp told me on the streets not far from Aquarian, how he could get me anything I’d wanted, genie style. that night when I didn’t have back up, knowing full well Kemp knew how to tussle, despite my quietest wish whispering about a change of order, a night where we didstand up to those men together, I remembered the severity of Kemp’s serious face when he’d said it. the kind of trouble we’d have made in a combo like that. I’ve been wary of the monkey paw side effects of a wish since. there’s no such thing as an innocuous one…the wonders of the 5 dimensional and unexplained a thing of the spirit world and accessible only to those who took up a daily practice to commune with it..Kemp clearly a lifetime member…alas the only shortcut to spirit being death. this one night’s ceasefire resetting my clock to find out much later.

​

it’s one thing to experience desire on your own, it’s another to taste someone else’s and forget you didn’t cook it yourself. I watched Kemp fall in love firsthand that summer with one of our beautiful coworkers. in similar timing, I caught a light crush at the pool hall—nothing inherently that made waves in my life (no chapter for Canon :(), however the whispers of encouraging advice to stoke that fire at all from Kemp were intoxicating. to be frank we were generally intoxicated. with each other, our girls, and 50% off Old fashions and tequilas post shift. Kemp would arrive at the start of our 8 hour hospitality dance with a bag of mystery weed they’d found on the walk there and the countdown would begin. we’d camp at the end of the bar waiting for the other to join, scarfing down likely the only meal we got that day, ready to burn the rest of our cash on the high that only comes from being able to buy the next round simply cos you can.

​

that night of this questionable weed on the sidewalk stamped our logo through the memory of smoking it and engaging in the singularly most intense game of badminton anyone’s ever seen. Kemp’s crush had a court in her backyard with her boyfriend, it awakened the animals in us, scREAming SCOOOOOOOOP every. single. time. we’d swatted at the shuttlecock. it was the days I’d let myself get entirely stoned around people, to the point where the once innocent game of truth or dare became “hey hobbes kiss [redacted].” but that night I’d felt and seen the shark behind her eyes and couldn’t/wouldn’t do it. all it took was my look of faded panic for Kemp to volunteer in my place (my hero <3). “there” or not…we protect each other.

​

fun, spontaneous us. laughing loudly and working the room. by the time you’d left for the New Mexico desert, there was almost a sense of relief—I’d always been terrified of connections I want so badly, enjoy so much, see all the future in, how can it last? space has become the necessary particle to balance the equation..didn’t know at the time that even that could be customized…

​

1900 miles turned into 2200 miles turned into 1700 miles turned into omnisciently close with no body to touch. Salt Lake lit you up, you love change as much as I do—shiny new frontiers and a whole new relationship to relearn the harder lessons we always stayed parallel in romantically. much like richmond, I think you got the sense you were too tall for that frame. even that much more like you, you took up bartending with such ferocious zeal that the idea of us ever working together again became its own warning to the world: watch what happens next. a three whole seconds later and I pick up the phone to hear that lovely voice informing me an advancement into ~one of the best bars in the country~ in Denver, your eventual resting-in-power location. fuck. I mean, congrats!! I’d always known you to be one of the best of the very best in all departments, news like this came to me as zero surprise and all support..I’d even laughed off you mentioning wanting my input for the hotel bar arena..I look back and know that I can’t change what’s done but maybe if you’d called me and I took up a jealous rage and told you to stay in Salt Lake and that even in that rage you decided fuck that hotel bar in addition to perhaps I was a jealous shitty friend you didn’t want anymore maybe just maybe you’d still be alive I’d take it. god, I’d take it.

​

off you went and packed up for this amazing opportunity to both challenge and reward yourself for the kind of amazing presence you bring and should be paid solely for. there I sat at my desk looking out the window up at the sky, the lessening 2200 miles between us slowly becoming a tight 1700 wondering when it might shrink again to bring us closer once more. turns out I was down to do it myself when a Road Trip fashioned itself into my plans just a year later. this trip..this return to your arms as though not a day of distance had run through us is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. after so many nights of raw texts about our lives, placed and misplaced phone calls to catch each other back up and more importantly just be near each other, finally I see you on Champa street with your all black ensemble and cracked open smile and giant laugh. finally, finally.

​

this visit encased our growth onto similar life paths in a big picture way. the tiredness of the grind had worn us both down, while night one had to live in grand drunken stupor the classic rock ’n roll way, our next was swathed in stillness…dancing with you again, roaming the streets, I know that us..to discover another page in our book that included going great lengths to spend time in warm water in green company out in the middle of nowhere, it felt like the future kissed our cheeks in encouragement. I remember all of us witnessing a dangerous driver on the way out to that hot spring in the mountains, that incessant gust of reality’s wind reminding me to be deliberate about our safety, don’t always poke at it..goddammit.

​

you closed your eyes at the hot springs and said several times how much you needed this rest. peace.

​

so many wishes have been made for how to make these short 2 days more entwined with you…however I now know better for what was our ultimate journey towards healthy collaboration within those lines of space. we had our day watching cartoons like kids, walking the city like adults, and night of italian cinematic drama like goblins. it is by no coincidence that we watched Moonstruck together and you’ve since become my Cosmo Moon. huge mysterious glorious Cosmo Moon.

​

leaving you felt like a continuation, no strangers to this dynamic. however I wish I’d lingered a second longer. an extra extra hug on the way out. a minute more of eye contact. shit, one more IG DM, I’ll greedily take it. add it to the bucket.

​

I should have been more specific when I wished for a lifetime with you.

_______________________________________________________________________

​

the veil of life’s true porosity revealed the moment I got the phone call shortly after I’d held a convo around dying friends too early in life with my ma and younger brother and quietly wished the same wouldn’t happen to me. between my family member’s that day there’d been two losses discussed but by that afternoon there’d been three. a sickening welcome to a club with jackets no one wants to wear. I’d gotten a message from his bestie Jingo to call him. I called, he haggardly told me to call Kemp’s ma. I held my breath before I did, knowing with my body something horrible had happened but hopefully just that. not worst case scenario. I stood in my grandma’s kitchen no one ever cooked in, right next to the sink, not thinking to take this call outside when it felt like time had stopped completely for this conversation. Kemp’s Ma spoke aloud one of the worst sentences I had ever heard in my near 30 years on this god forsaken rock. Kemp had taken a bunch of mushrooms and had fallen off of a building, dying inside a hospital not long after. I could hear my departed friend’s scream echoing inside my mind at full volume for hours. I fell to my knees, crying out my disbelief but still finding my limbs long enough to thank her for telling me.

​

it didn’t make any fucking sense. the *why* behind it all, the implication it held. the tragedy it couldn’t avoid. the pain of the first raw, bloody heartbreak I felt rupturing everything I’d come to know. I went out to the pool, my ma enjoying her first moment of levity in her vermont visit, to sit there unable to stop the crying that felt like profuse bleeding and ask to go “home”. in this particular context, “home” meant 3 hours south in hudson valley new york, where’d I’d just landed for the summer and had spoken to Kemp not even a full 48 hours earlier while I was cleaning the place till my knuckles went windex blue. I’d driven myself to grandma’s mountain house, no one liked the idea of me driving myself back when so much blood water was bursting out of my eyes. they insisted I’d stayed but truthfully I’d rather have died than spend one more minute near that kitchen that contained the audio remnants of Kemp’s death. I also knew there was only one person I wanted to be around when I let myself fully fall apart.

​

it’s wild to think of what our brains commit to memory and what we let slip away, I can tell you I didn’t miss an inch of that sequence where my baby brother drove the truck with my Ma in the passenger seat while my grandma’s lover took his car to basically give us a 90mph police escort across state lines. I sat in the back looking out the window, honestly such a beautiful day, mountains peppered with clouds and the sun shining. I kept becoming increasingly alarmed the more I couldn’t detect Kemp. not one iota of presence. not one sighting of them in the atmosphere. I could also barely sit with how fucking fast this car was moving so the mission became, can I go 1.5 hours without crying? we can go halfway and I can take over from there, if I can do that. 45 minutes straight concentrated focus to not let my eyes leak. it became the measuring stick for just how uncomfortable I felt to be grieving so vulnerably with my nuclear family. I told them to stop the car after I proved to myself I could let up and told them goodbye in a parking lot, all against their wishes. I couldn’t even look my grandma in the eye on the way out, everything just felt like a knife. I remember thinking, I’m going to remember all of this and likely forever associate whatever I do, listen to, or eat next with this on my way back. I haven’t listened to Tame Impala as much as I used to or eaten chocolate donuts and essentia water since.

​

the following days leading into weeks leading into the rest of the summer became the official birthplace of who I am today: a spiritual bitch.

 

I wrote this, then:

______________________________________________________________________

 

when I imagine, now, what it would ~feel~ or look like to lose someone close to me cos that’s apparently part of my daily routine now, it’s become that moment in a mistaken nap--your hand holding up your face gives way to the shortest longest fall to bop you back into this dimension, alert, just barely missing that leap into it fully. this grief feels like a room full of mirrors stretching into infinity, displaying with precision exactly how any additional losses will feel..as though if I think about it too long, one millisecond past the complete descent into the full sleep..it’ll simply become true. I’ll have suddenly fallen into that reality equally as confused and frustrated as I felt myself enter this one on June 11th.

​

I came into this summer with a focused curiosity on spirituality. I’d always known it to be one of the final frontiers of my twenties to kick off the true “adulthood” I foresee for my 30’s. I’ve wanted to set myself up as best I can to take on that next chapter with max amounts of grace, integrity, humor, & patience. I aim for calisthenics. for stretching. reading. playing. mental freedom to pursue new interests with enough patience to see it through when it frustrates me the most. I aim for little to no alcohol intake. I aim for the wherewithal to know when to end things, when to start again. I picture a tool belt with old classics of doing things anyway when I’m petrified, drawing protective energy between myself and succubus energy in people, healthy coping skills. my spirituality until this year has known what it needs to see all of those goals through. we never start at a level 0 with spirituality, it’s simply how much stillness you build in overtime that ripens it for further exploration.

​

week one broke me down. for someone who chooses to embrace nuance and adores the unexplainable, Kemp passing and the way he did rocked me. obviously. you love someone, it equals pain inevitably. inner child hobbes begs to die before anyone else.

​

to know it will happen again is enough to pivot straight into suicidal nihilism. maybe not enough to act on it with the finality of death (though very close), certainly enough to shift into the attitude adjustment completely. I think of my young mind trained by the sims..given limited options of react and response for any scenario until the choices became so many it felt too fucking real and I gave up playing any advanced versions. the thing about the sims you can’t capture is that essentially THE force in our decisions and processes is dialogue. no moment in between choices where a friend or family names their choice (with the notes that got them there) vs you relying on your lacking perception of such.

​

it only eased when I spoke with Jingo, another close friend of Kemp’s. a rope tossed down or a cheat code, it bursted me back. I clung so fucking hard to it, it coasted me for another week with a newfound ability to function. I spent 5 straight hours piecing together footage from the road trip for a music video, my new holy grail of tv to think of literally anything else.

duality is the new baseline for emotions. the jarring rise of happiness with cold sadness pierces through every single experience I used to write love poems every morning in my journal about. I’m actively avoiding being left to my thoughts unless I have something cued up that’s not this. as much as we all know death to be true and permanent, as much as I could have known it’d change me eventually in ways I couldn’t predict, as much as it happens, what the fuck.

​

I feel so confused, so frustrated and stupid for how many times I have to remember it’s a fact. Kemp as I knew them is dead. I have pictured punching a hole in a wall so many times it feels like I actually have. I have wanted to quit everything, I have wanted to push everyone I know away and terminate any future connections that could happen to avoid this. I have wanted to become the full fledged curmudgeon in the movie and let it rip, fuck it. I have wanted to not answer a single fucking phone call from my mother (or anyone for that matter) to not witness the sadness of someone upset that the dog ain’t barking. I have wanted to go find the human who was with Kemp last and beat them with my bare hands until the truth of that night comes out.

​

Chrysalis tells me people lie about death in the name of peace. that even if I pursued it, it’s not likely to be known for quite some time anyhow. if ever. a none of your business with real sting.

 

Angel tells me there’s a way to talk to Kemp directly, just as I speak with my higher self. I have found truth in this. I’ve never bothered to try speaking with my deceased grandparents in great depth, maybe I’ll try that with them too.

​

Purple tells me they couldn’t choose shutting down when this happened to them just a couple short months ago. no stranger to terrible news, they say there’s another way. it’s also a lot harder.

​

Ma tells me it’ll never be ok. it’ll always feel like shit. the biting truth here feels welcome.

​

Mango sits with me. a lighthouse in a cosmic storm, pouring in love even as I reject myself.

​

the fullness of the universe listening so intently and presenting this reality so softly to me is perhaps the greatest gift I’ve ever known. the reminder that I’m not alone, not ignored, and surrounded by people who are carrying this, too--many for quite some time.

​

I think of how fucked it was when Antonio lost his friend in the ocean and had to come home without his body. death a simple fact.

​

when Kemp died, I couldn’t feel them. it felt like they exited the way you would a party you suddenly decided was over. onto the next. he’s always been someone who doubled as a loner in many ways as much as a “I’d love it if you came too” in the next breath. wouldn’t share a kitchen to cook yet was one of the first people to seriously offer taking a chance and doing life together in uncharted territory. partners in crime, moon as our compass. I think of that fork in the road, if I had gone...I see our future here no differently. only that much more heartbreak to sift through, if that’s even possible. our love traveled steadily between us thru time, present in our highest highs and lowest lows. I remember telling [Redacted] a secret I never told Kemp when I thought I could trade some realness in exchange for a shift in our then crumbling relationship structure: Kemp is someone I could envision having closer poly-like intimacy with. the spark of what our fast bond was got muddled in the moment of what I hadn’t expanded my romantic freedom or imagination in just yet. all that to say, I wanted a lifetime..should’ve been more specific huh. in this place, here in new york I could see the realm of possibility for the first time to get more than a catch up. new york opened up the slot for collaboration I so craved with them. and yet.

​

if I wasn’t at this point already feeling the unmistakable churn of something more to this life beyond what I can see, this entry would be teeming with a lot more anger. I’ve been waiting for a fit of outrage reminiscent of my older brother to hit...and maybe it’s yet to come, but as I see it and have been shoved into the corridor of ask and you shall receive, the uni continues to abundantly illuminate the permeability of this felt permanence.

​

I was at a community engagement function this weekend when we were all given random questions to break the ice with each other one on one. to figure out who goes first, the facilitator says whoever cried most recently will go. I look in the eyes of this beautiful stranger, already feeling the shared vulnerability of the room and explain how only lately I’ve learned to cry when I feel it and not wait for it to get curated in a Lion King screening. this person easily replies how they can’t remember if they cried this morning--something they usually begin the day with. so matter of fact. they give a pause after what I’ve said for me to fill with “well I avoided it so long cos crying has always felt like bringing something too heavy into this reality, it makes that emotion too real..I couldn’t deal” this person then answers my randomly assigned question of where in your childhood did you feel closest to nature? they go on to say they were just in West Africa standing on a rock in a river, feeling the people, stories, and raw history of that space so deeply

​

(cue me mentally ramping up to relate on some level of that feeling in the swamps of virginia)

​

before they went back home to Cameroon.

​

this exact moment of meeting a mirror of my people, of me, QUEER me, catapults me straight into their arms sobbing my damn eyes out telling them I’m Cameroonian too-- opens a portal. we bond further in our conversation, they want to go back next year and take folks with them as a penance for the guilt of leaving in the first place. regardless of what may happen with us in this possible collaborative future, I see a pathway aimed towards growing my spirituality in a visceral home-grown way I’ve never known before and could never achieve if I never go. to be a lost child of your land and people, to feel the grip of this embrace from someone I feel is part of an us I rejected myself from before anyone else could..beyond the gift of hearing them speak on my estranged family’s coastal town, it rains abundance on my soul to know I’m one step closer to nurturing my ties with the spirit world, towards one day feeling the visceral shift from Kemp’s absence into shared company once more.

​

for that, I am grateful.

 

overjoyed, even.

 

and so so so incredibly sad.

_______________________________________________________________________

​

what’s crazy and lives so peacefully curious in my chest is how you’d been there when I fell off that building years before you’d fallen off yours.. as if perhaps I got primed firsthand in the unknowns of a night drenched in a few tecate’s sweat ending in a fire escape slam. after we’d done what we’d always do: slink through the night looking for good trouble…high up. I’d seen you so effortlessly scale building walls, therefore I thought I could too. that transitive property still infectious. even the glowing warning that I’d needed your help to get up there, I allowed for liquid courage to do the math of me getting back down…though the pain didn’t set in too hard, my adrenaline and your swift follow to not only check for me, but deliver the largest pill of ibuprofen and weed edible I’d ever seen was titanium. I asked you to call my mom—unavailable—she was in another time zone on her own trip of a lifetime. I just knew I didn’t want to go to the hospital or worse yet, home alone. with all that roaring kindness inside you, Kemp, you called the flashiest uber adorned in christmas lights with the world’s biggest druncle driving us home rambling on about how his worst fall was worse than mine. I recall being grateful for the preamble of noise before the comatose cocktail of man’s medicine and natures combined for an undisputed full night’s rest. waking up and seeing the confirmation that the night before was actually in this dimension via a constellation of bruises all over my back was hard. seeing you there, in all your loyal glory, telling me “at least you’re alive?” made it all too easy to continue onwards, even celebrating the day at the beach as we’d previously planned. water our healing vessel of choice.

​

when I asked about you…the tarot cards revealed on your behalf to not fuck this up. that I needed to move with equanimity. no more transitive property, find the pause and move with intention.

​

dearest Kemp, my moon, I offer you my every 28 days the grand honor of intentional attention. all of life’s greatest cycles run a short orbit (water, butterflies, any ride @ busch gardens, my period etc etc), if I’m out here bleeding on that timeline anyway, I’m pleased to feel nature’s watchful company in release unto your amber energy. you remind me to set things on fire, to take long walks of brooding beneath Her, to invite others into sustainable grieving (oxymoron much?). I think of the last meal we shared together, a whole ass chicken, I cook that. I reflect on your energy, a sharp presence I’ll surely never forget, I imbue that. I remember the small circular moons tattooed on your fingers, when I see it on others I pay attention. I follow your language, I practice surrendering to what we are now, what we have and no longer do. I bring your ashes with me on every trip, I spread them at cookout. I built a gravesite for you on the rail trail of the Hudson, the first place I felt you again, rollerblading alongside me. I say your name every chance I get. I thank goddess that for now, I live near a place called Kempsville and get to wonder at the musings of your kingdom. I hung up the shirt you designed as though it’s always next in the rotation even if I’m too wary of wearing it elsewhere on this crass planet.

I write this..knowing I could never forget it, so no, not to preserve, rather to share more of you. your transition felt like a tree falling in a forest we all heard about on remote islands. flying to denver to “bury” you, meeting more of your people, spending the day with them and the night near your mom, my only wish was that I’d have written this by then. your baby photos next to your paintings…your beautiful, magnanimous paintings, jesus christ Kemp why was it your Ma who had to be the one to tell me Meryl Streep awarded you for one? humble human, jesus. truth is, I probably wouldn’t have been satisfied with any tribute towards you. any space we could’ve held, any speech we could’ve made, it has and continues to feel with great fervor that your death was a failure of Time itself. who am I to say too soon? that doesn’t puncture the hole I know we all felt ripped into the space time continuum since your physical departure.

we continue. you continue.

 

I continue.

​

mostly cos I heard it when you told me straight up we live forever.

though, who knows how many moons we have left in this perspective…looking forward to up above or deep inside it with ya, mate. endless love for you.