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By HB, January 1, 2012 1:57 pm

For years now, I have considered myself to be a romantic person at heart. Sometime around the age of 17, I started to love the idea of being in love, of having that one person who is yours, who watches out for you, holds your hand. The special one. I don’t think anything really captures it quite as well as an experience I had with an ex-boyfriend. He and I had broken up years earlier, and our lives had long since drifted apart. I had been married and divorced in the meantime, and all hope of the two of us ever being together had evaporated a long time ago. But one night, we got together after not having seen each other for a year or two, and we went to see a movie. I remember being in the lobby of the theatre, waiting for him to get out of the bathroom. I remember looking at the heads. The hairs on the heads of the people milling around. When there are a lot of people, sometimes all you can see are the tops of the heads. And I remember the moment when, in the crowd, I saw the special one. The others were gray and dim. This one was bright and shining like the sun. This was the one I was looking for. For the night, this one was mine.

Every year, at 11:59pm on December 31, if you have someone who is yours, you count down from 10 and when midnight hits: A kiss. The idea of the midnight kiss is a lovely one. It’s not just any kiss. It’s a special kiss. It says, “Of all the world, I want to start my year with you. You are mine.”

Of all the couples who kissed at midnight this year, it would be interesting to see some kind of graph or chart that shows how much of the new year they actually spend together. Some will stay together for a long time. They’ll kiss each other at midnight again next year, and for years to come. Some couples will only last another few months before their lives drift apart. The memory of their midnight kiss will linger for a while and then fade as other, newer kisses replace it.

There are a few times during the year when your singleness is pointed out to you by the world. The world doesn’t want you to be single. “Be coupled,” it says. Buy that special gift at Christmastime. Eat a romantic dinner on Valentine’s Day. Kiss someone at midnight on New Years. But sometimes, when the clock counts down at 11:59, you look around you and none of the heads in the room are yours. All the faces are gray. None of them shine brightly like the sun. You look around, and you feel the sense of “missing-ness”.

Not this year. This year was different. I looked around, and instead of seeing a sea of gray faces and lamenting the lack of my shining one, I saw a river. A river of time that flows, and twists, and brings people together and apart, and together and apart, like so many stones, rolling along the bottom of the riverbed. The thing about the river stones, is that they are not “halves of stones”, waiting to be connected to each other. They are whole. All by themselves. There was only one midnight kiss in the room where I counted down last night. Two of the river stones were rolling close last night. But the rest of us, who had no kiss: We are whole. And we roll into 2012, ready to see where the river takes us next.

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By HB, December 15, 2011 11:36 pm

I got some news today that I can hardly believe. I don’t want to believe it. I want it to not be true. I wish it was not true… But it is true. He is gone.

Alexander has gone.

The world doesn’t know what it lost today. The world largely ignored Alex. He had a hard time finding a job. He had a hard time earning enough money. His life was harder than it should have been, because the world, as a whole, didn’t value what Alexander had.

Alex had a unique gift. What he had was something more valuable than any award the world gives. Worth more than diamonds, more than a fancy job title, a degree or any amount of money. Because you can’t buy what Alex had. He had the ability to fill a room with unearthly beauty. Through his cello, he brought us all a little closer to something not-quite-of-this-world. And those who heard him, who had ears to hear, knew that what they were listening to was nothing less than the windows of heaven, opening up to shine a light into the world.

Alex was hard to get to know. He didn’t always say the right things. He didn’t say all those meaningless little nothings that people say to each other in order to get along in life. He didn’t fluff up a conversation, or tell you what you wanted to hear. He would say something. Or nothing. It was up to you to decide what to do with it. People who need to talk, in order to get to know someone, had a hard time getting to know him. If you wanted to know Alex, you had to go to where Alex was. He was always, and ever, in the music. His true self was there. That’s how you got to know him. When he was playing, he spoke his true self to us, plain as day. And his true self—his life, his heart—was something of astonishing beauty.

I was fortunate enough, not just to have heard him play, but to have played with him. These experiences will stand out to me, forever, as some of the best of my life. He was a better musician than I was, always. That special thing that elevates music to a higher level, that gives it the power to change hearts and lives… he had more of it than I did. But when we played together, he brought me along with him. I matched him breath for breath. I matched his bow and his rhythm, and the rise and fall of the music when we played together took me to another place. A better place.

Someday, Alex… I hope I can go back to that place with you. I know you’re in a better place now. And in a way, I’m actually happy. I’m glad you won’t have to suffer grief, or pain, or sorrow anymore. Ever. But I will miss you more than you know. More than you could possibly have guessed, because we didn’t talk much. I never called you out of the blue, or wrote you letters… but I feel like I knew your heart. I knew you through your music.

That’s where your heart was.

I recorded this tonight. It’s a piece of the last song we played together. (With Jennifer, remember?) It will echo in my heart for always. It doesn’t sound as good as when you played it. And to everyone else, I’m sure it sounds empty without you. But I can still hear your music, clear and pure as it was on the day we performed it together.

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By HB, December 14, 2011 11:19 pm

Today, I was rendered speechless by an overwhelming act of generosity and goodwill. I had nothing to say. I cried after I left the woman’s house. Which is unusual for me. Sometimes, when a friendly hand welcomes you into the shade after you’ve walked in the hot sun for a long time, it’s too much. Sometimes, it’s only when the shade comes that you realize how tired you are.

People talk about this stuff all the time, about how God’s not here, so we have to help each other. And it’s always cheesy and ridiculous. Until it happens to you. And in that moment, when you feel someone’s hand on your shoulder and know that it’s not really their hand, because how could it be? They don’t even know you… in that moment, you find the strength to keep walking a little bit longer. Just a little further. You start to feel like maybe you can make it after all.

People believe in different hands. Encompassing earth-mother hands, connected life-force hands, fatherly hand-of-God hands, hands of departed loved ones and companions. Some people believe in no hands, but I think, in their hearts, even those people want to believe. Even Hollywood believes in the hand. The mysterious stranger who gives the hero the key piece of knowledge right before she gives up. The series of improbable coincidences that leads the two main characters together, that helps the mother find her long-lost child, that pushes (sometimes pulls) humanity onward through the darkness.

I hope that someday I can help somebody else feel as comforted as I felt today. I hope I can welcome someone into my house and say, “Come in, weary stranger. Come in and rest.”