I met a traveller from an antique land

About a week before my due date, I found out that one of my friends had died. I wanted to write "one of my closest friends on earth" but that's misleading, if only temporally. For 6 or 7 years he was just that, only we were romantically entangled by the end of those years, ultimately leading to a break up, a necessary period of separation, and the ensuing detachment that removed the label "closest." But we were still friends. And we still shared an almost psychic understanding of each other, a mutual love/hate relationship with words, and an indellible sense of nostalgia. These things never died. And then he did. And now I'm the one who carries them around in an urn inside me, not sure if they're whole or ashes, wondering what to do with them now that the person who gave them their worth is gone. The hardest part to wrap my head around is the fact that my not-seeing him is now permanent. In this day and age, we don't-see people all the time, but we know they're out there, and we reach out with a phone or email or skype or what have you, and they respond, sometimes months later, sometimes at such great length that one loses the words to respond back because they've used them all up. I have become way too accustomed to this sense that all the people I love dearly are "out there" like fruit on the branch, that all I have to do is look up and reach for them and they'll be solid again.
The branch that held my friend let him go when I wasn't looking. I can look up and reach all I want, but all I'll find is branch, and the very ground I stand on to do so is where he is now.
The problem is, I keep walking past this metaphorical tree and not looking; the synapses in my brain that trigger loss have withered from non-use. This is a blessing and a curse. This is my first major loss of a person I knew intimately, loved deeply, a person whom I wanted to share my life before, during and after romance, a person whose life was so precious to me that I spent time actively fearing his death. Those synapses withered because I made it this far without that kind of loss: blessing. But now I can't seem to bring his death into my everyday life: curse. This feels like a betrayal of how much I loved him. I should be wracked, wrung out, a wreck, because I loved him that much, and instead, I drink my coffee and I coach my team and I send emails to his friends speaking the language but not feeling the emotions.
I know that no grieving process is wrong, that everyone does it differently. But I want my grief to equal the loss of him, an oceanic grief where his shade haunts me, and instead I have a shallow and muddy puddle.
I know in his pragmatism he'd say "House, chop wood, carry water." He always did seem bemused by my ability to overthink emotions, and to an extent I am most certainly trying to find wood in the well and chop water into logs. But I am disappointed in this grieving process, as absurd as that is. There are a lot of ifs -- if I hadn't just had a baby, if I hadn't just started a job, if I hadn't just moved to Connecticut, if I had still seen him regularly, if I had the time and the space -- I would engage the tragedy in a way that feels appropriate to its magnitude.
Instead I'm taking a stolen moment to write a blog entry. Chad, are you laughing at me? I'm sure you are, in your caustic way.
I feel lucky that the last time I saw him was in New Mexico. I close my eyes and think of him and I smell new-fallen snow and pine trees. I see him, hungover in oversized snow boots and his Wesleyan sweatshirt, trudging through the snow to show us his property: the fences he repaired, the shooting ranges, the marker for his parents' graves. I hear the way he snorted in air periodically, see his jaw lock as he aimed his gun, watch his casually down-cast eyes trace the path ahead of him, the solicitous tone to his voice, the sarcastic tone to his laugh. I'm glad it's not Wesleyan, or San Francisco, or New York, or Chicago I remember first. I'm glad I see a winterized desert landscape, boundless and bare, where the lone and level landscape stretches far away.

"I met a traveler from an antique land..."