So, my beloved boyfriend of six-and-a-half years, Thomas (and beloved/much-irritated-at ex-boyfriend of one-and-a-half years, also Thomas), died this past May-- May 29th-- of a morphine overdose. I'll never forget getting the call from his sister, who found him, and his mother. She just said "Oh, Katie," and I knew right away what had happened somehow, and just started screaming.
Those first few weeks were a real horror show. Forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep, waking up crying and having weird dreams, afraid I would start to forget him or cease to love him if I didn't think about him all the time. The trance-like memorial in the cemetery; putting his ashes into an old 1970s bon-bon tin with the Love Is... kids on the lid, licking ash residue off my fingers after spreading some and feeling his bone-bits in my teeth all day. Spending time with his family; meeting the 17-year-old girl he was dating when last he was alive (horrors). Missing him terribly, thinking magically, and basically longing for things to be different.
His family life is fascinating, and so is his personal story. My view of him was so intimate and so oddly intertwined with my own identity that having lost him is still not real. He was an artist, a dreamer, an asshole, a lover, a wonderful poet, intensely charismatic and attractive, a performer, a musician, the father of my two unborn children, great in bed, madly funny, imperfect, human, genuinely intelligent, a liar, insanely articulate, heartbroken/permanently homesick, and absolutely wonderful.
I'm starting a book about him which I have been planning since he was alive and we were together, a memoir-type of thing. I have the title and have had it for forever (though at the time I didn't have the ending yet), and he loved it and would love that I'm doing this. I haven't put pen to paper yet specifically in the little Mead notebook which I bought to start the project in, and I'm feeling overwhelmed at the thought of culling and refining all of this life-stuff, but I need to get started already and want to get started and can't wait for the world to meet him-- I feel like it's going to be great and lovely and big.
The above picture is Thomas and I in the snow one month before we broke up for the last time a year and a half ago. I was three months pregnant there. He was so pissed, because he thought the plan was to take the picture of us kissing lying down in the snow, but I had positioned the camera for us standing up.(That says a lot about our relationship in the post-drug years.) Beneath is a poorly-scanned photo-booth picture of us from four years ago (I was also pregnant in that one, come to think of it).
He was my baby-baby, and I hope the book turns out as well as I feel that it is going to. (Below, I put a rabbit pelt on Tom's head in a very serious manner, at age 18.)
I would read that book from cover to cover.
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