Dear Vinay
Last night was the first night my roommates and I ate dinner together. We were joined by one of our roommate’s partner and their two children so it felt like a real family meal. We ate curry.
I couldn’t help but remember how you so kindly invited me over to dinner during my first week in Ukiah, cooking a vegetarian dish and sharing some beers. I was so broke at the time all I could afford to bring was potatoes.
In fact, I was so broke when I moved to that dingy but beautiful little town that all I was eating was oatmeal for breakfast and popcorn for dinner. The bulk kind that you pop over the stove. This, after a month of eating one meal of rice and beans a day had made my stomach shrink so much that, as you so generously offered me helping after helping, filled me so much that I felt like I was going to burst!
This is, really, the most apt metaphor for our friendship, Vinay. You perceived the world as a place of such great abundance and I, so disheartened by the unexpected landing in a small, unsexy town, a place of scarcity.
There was so much joy to be had in the way you see the world. A limitless joy and I’m so grateful you shared it with me, reopening my eyes to it as time went by. The world is truly what you make it and you made it wonderful.
The hypocrisy I go through the world with has become rather funny to me. I realize it more and more as I meet people, such as yourself, who embody the characteristics I speak so highly of but lack the discipline and attentiveness to practice.
You, Vinay, embody so much of what I admire, but first and foremost: lightheartedness - the way you kept movement and grace in your body even while working in a dark cube in a job that required almost no motion from you at all. I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times in all sorts of whimsical or heartfelt ways but your laughter - that truly erupts out of you and dances all around you - fills everyone around you with joy. It is so contagious that it even cracks the hard shell of heavily tattooed bartenders dressed in full leather at shitty dive bars into a full brimmed smile.
There’s a sweet irony that you brought me to superhero movies. It took me far too long to remember that there are superpowers all around us.
I cannot express the gratitude I feel for being witness to the start of your family. I think it was the second or third week of my time in Ukiah when you hosted a baby shower. Looking back on that now I’m blown away by how welcoming you were to whoever was around you. How oblivious and nonchalant and selfishly careless they were around this event that means more to you than they will ever know. How you having a child with the love of your life suddenly became about their children, their memories, their parenthood. What a true waste it is to be so inattentive to what brings meaning to each other’s lives. How truly marvelous it is to recognize and connect with the development of one’s life in a sincere, attuned way.
Witnessing the love and care between you and XXXXX and XXXX was miraculous. It helps ease my soul to know that there are families with as much nurture and care and love flowing between its members as there is in yours. How you adore each other. How you show each other love in all sorts of acts of kindness and care. How you tied a string between you and your wife and your child to feel the direction of their movements. How you tapped into the most private depths of each other, the way only a family can.
If only the whole world was raised with as much love as your child will be.
I know there is an incommunicable part of you that is bathed in ache and pain from an injustice that is beyond anything any one person can heal. I will forever be in admiration of how you did not let this consumer you, ever trying to remind myself that what we feed is what fills us and envelopes us.
Much love to you,
Roman