A Eulogy for the Future

It is 1:24 AM and I am awake as fuck writing to no one about eulogies. Please don’t take this the wrong way: I do not mean to raise any eyebrows, moreover, I like to think of those hypothetical words as a way to strip the strongest relationships from any outward facing bullshit down to their truest core. What people would really remember about me, what I would remember about others. What those words would sound like — how maybe they’d be something beyond just speech or song; overcoming the simple annunciation of letters and transforming into palpable emotion. I mean emotion in the same way that John Prine lyrics make me want to intently listen to someone tell stories for hours. Or in the same way that I feel while staying up late, pounding keys into an empty word doc for zero purpose other than the hope of stringing together words that make me feel something.

So what would I say about [you?] What would you say about [me?] Perhaps we don’t have to die to differentiate the statement of love from question to fact; to concrete words that exist as more than just a best hits album from that night at the diner or that time at the beach.

Mix in a virus that took so much with a couple cups of The National and I’m a mess of nostalgia for a life that’s dead. But that’s not my point. It’s objectively greedy to wait till something’s gone to tell its story. So instead, I’m going to look toward a eulogy for the future, one in which I’ll tell you (and there are a lot of ‘yous’) that there is nothing I love more than sitting next to you, rotating between the metaphorical driver and passenger seat. We watch life pass by at 65 while we sit at zero, your top hits playlist humming in the background. The genres suggest it was a good year.

We don’t have to say much to each other to know how good it is to simply be. The kids are alright.