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246 63 D earest Blaze, It’s funny, I don’t feel haunted by you any more. Your presence has become lighter, more expanded. Like a house with no walls, you have no inside or out; nothing is left out of you. The writing belies that of course. It requires me to shape you into fragments with names: Mike, Tex, Depty, Blaze. A necessary illusion—helpful I guess—like the notion that there were two Blaze Foleys. Your anger mirrored the depth of your sensitivity ; they were one reality, just as you were one man living one life, however broken it might appear to others. The deception of dualities—male, female; black, white; Christian, Jew—obscures our truest identity. Just as, for the longest time, I thought life and death occupied separate realms. I mean you’re dead, and look how busy you’ve been. I had hoped remembering you might give your wandering heart a home. I didn’t know how much it was my own that needed mooring. You found me out and comforted me, didn’t you? Your return has made me whole—not because I was unfinished—but because it’s given me a glimpse of how things really are. A plethora of coincidences pave the way to you, my love. I suspect all of life is like this, each strand spliced by every other, though we rarely get to see those intersections where warp meets woof. The mystery of who we’re born to and who we’re given to love is beyond my comprehension, honey. So I keep to the small surprises, like the moment in Austin when I came upon your   | 247 drawing of what I first mistook for vultures—a tender pair of birds with heads together and wings outspread. But why should I be surprised that birds are part of our story? After all, they can fly. I went back to Udo, you know. And it occurred to me while I was there that maybe this is where the story should end—where it began. Only I was wrong about art, Blaze; it is like life. It has no beginning and no end. For there are your songs now, and wherever they wander, they take us with them—us, and a little house in a tree, waiting for two young lovers to come down the path and fall asleep under an apricot moon, both of them whole and in a perfect world. Depty, I love you all ways. Sybil ...

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