Birthday wishes

Today, you would be 38, and as always, I find myself wondering what you would look like. As the texts roll around through our little band of 'friends who remember', I wonder what kind of bash it would have been this year. I wonder where you would be working, would it be with wine, or food, or both? What gorgeous new look would you be sporting - a hat, a waistcoat, some new scarf... I wish, I wish we could see you now.

I figured out a long while ago that if Mikko could have found a way to reconcile the beautiful and terrible within (to say nothing of the way he experienced these forces in the world), he'd have done it. I have wished, more times than I can count, that I could have worked out how to bottle whatever it was that makes the difference between climbing out of a hole, and not.

He is not the only one of us to have sat alone in the dark at the bottom of that hole... but he is the one of us that is no longer here. I look at this circle of friends - all the people who leaned on one another during those terrible first few months - and even while I miss him, I am relieved - proud, even - that the rest of us are still here. I think he's a bit of an arse for missing it all. But more than that, I wish he was still here, because the more birthdays he doesn't have, the further away he drifts from the rest of us. He is falling behind.

Because whatever it is, there IS something that CAN keep rising in the face of darkness, even when the ground beneath our feet rumbles, shudders and disappears. There IS a capacity for Life, the Universe, Divine Intervention, the power of the human spirit or whatever you want to call it, to keep inspiring us to reach beyond ourselves and toward the stars.

I wish I could bottle that, and toast you with it every year, to keep you going til the next one.
But I can't, so I will toast you and drink it for me, and for all of us still here.

Happy birthday Mikko.