Every morning I pedal my bike along a path the hugs the shore. I look out at the Pacific Ocean and feel the weight of myself. I am naval lint; I am an absolute fleck of dust on a windshield. I am bird crap in comparison to this stretch of tides.
I ride through the morning mist and think that if atoms suddenly lost any ability to cling to each other, I could easily become part of everything that surrounds me. Just dissolve away like Robert Patrick in Terminator 2.
I feel Bob when I'm in a place like this, surrounded by nothing but earth. Not as strongly as I did that day on the cliffs in Chico, only weeks after he left, when the breeze rolled along my neck and my cheek and I knew it was him. It sounds so trite to someone who's never been so incredibly close to someone who has died. I couldn't tell you how I knew it was him because there was no scent, no whisper, just this feeling of his entire being washing through me like I was mesh, and then against me. It was like a kiss, a caress, and I almost choked because I knew it was him, and I don't care if you think I'm crazy (maybe I am).
I must sound so redundant--Bob this, Bob that--but he was so much a part of my life that I'd be an ass to stop.
"Hey Bob, thanks for everything you ever did for me and my family and all the love you put into my life. I'm going to stop talking about you because I'm a jerk."
The truth is, I couldn't stop if I wanted to. I don't ever want him to be the past.
"I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."__My Antonia by Willa Cather
