into_the_mystic raze i wonder what you'd look like if you were still here. cancer caught you in its resin and froze you fifteen years ago. you'll always be a blonde-haired blackjack dealer to me. i can't imagine you going grey. i want to trade blows with the disease that beat you in a filthy street fight. i know i wouldn't stand a chance. but if i could land one good shot — if i could make the fucker hurt for taking too many good people away before their time — it would be worth whatever punishment i had to absorb to get there. by the time we had your funeral, you were cinders and bone. your brother richard gave the eulogy. he got a lot of laughs. if he hadn't been a chef, he would have made a good standup comic. i shook the cold hand of the man you were married to for thirty-two years. "i don't know how much you knew about the relationship," he said. and then he lost it. he couldn't put into words what you meant to him. i think he would have fallen over if i blew on him. i put my arm around his shoulder and let him cry. i didn't know what else to do. richard asked if we were coming over after the service. "will there be booze?" i asked. you'd have to know him to understand how that was the right question to ask at the right time. and you knew him better than anyone. he laughed and said, "at my house, it comes out of the tap." it would make you sick to know him now. he struck it rich and turned into the worst kind of asshole. maybe losing you robbed him of the last bit of humanity he had left. i don't know. there's no way to know. you lived across the street from me for four years. i only met you once. we sat on your patio and drank red_wine. richard tickled me and growled something mary used to say in czech to make me laugh when i was a kid. i felt like i was five years old again. no one ever told me what the words meant. richard said she left him all her recipes. she wrote them out by hand. you sat in a plastic chair and wrapped a white blanket around your body like a cape. i don't remember you saying anything. i just remember your smile. we didn't set foot in that house again. it wouldn't have been the same. you didn't live there anymore. you lived in a vase that looked like a teapot. before richard started cracking jokes that night, they played your favourite song on a little black boombox. van morrison sang about smelling the sea and feeling the sky, and i remembered what my dad told me about you. at his mother's funeral, when he was staring at the casket and trying not to scream, you took his hand and held it so hard he thought it might break. you wept for him and what he'd lost. and for an afternoon, he loved you more than anything in the world. i never knew you. but i could feel you in the music, rocking my gypsy soul with sly string swells and saxophone harmonies. when that beautiful irishman wailed, "it's too late to stop now," i threw my head back and smiled, and i learned how to sigh without making a sound. 220519 what's it to you? who go blather from