You would have been (are? I don’t know how these things work, I only know that you are not here) 56 years old yesterday. Because I was swamped with homework and I didn’t order all the right ingredients, we had your birthday dinner tonight. It’s become a sweet family tradition, your papa’s pappas with a red, white, & blue smoothie. I cracked a joke that no one got, but it was really just for you anyway.

We miss you. It seems like such a silly, obvious thing, but when I was looking through pictures, I realized that I simply will never have any more. What we have is all there will ever be, and I was suddenly achingly sad. I rang your bell and I lit some nag champa, and watched the rainbows on the wall through my open window. It’s unseasonably warm, and I appreciated that today. I feel so inadequate to convey who you are, who you were, how important you were—and remain to me in inconceivable ways. None of it is enough. And it’s all we’ve got.

I miss you. I have deep love in my life, and great happiness and stability, and the duality of life and love is that I can have all of those things, and they can be deeply real, and nothing minimizes the other. That the sharpness of your loss still catches me in the small of my heart and makes me hold my breathe, my eyes sting, my belly hollow, even now, years later. I miss you.

We all miss you.