ONWARD & UPWARD! Always : Part ONE

Recently, I witnessed a shining example of the true love of enduring -- albeit, long lost -- friendship, written in a most eloquent manner by a person I hold very dear to my heart. While permission to identify this person has yet to be granted, I would like to take it upon myself to breach the great Zeitgeist of absence that has separated me not only from the blogosphere for quite sometime, but also from this dear friend of mine for far longer a period than ever should have been permissible in the mind's eye.

Rest assured; my mind's eye faces forward, in face of much "trepidation" -- as I call it in my response to her eloquently evocative and poetic enunciation of regret, remorse and respite of rectitude. Or else, be it called turmoil, trauma, terror, torture, and eventual tenacity of spirit sprung up through experience and circumstance, disease and degradation, deflation of ego -- ergo, we marvel together at miracles and pontificate over pain, as a peculiar pernicious passing way to cleanse ourselves of calamity and chaos. 

Hence, I help myself to a heaping dollop of duplication, as if perchance to replicate the immense emotion(s) that teemed deep within my mind at the moment I read and responded to the unfortunate circumstances under which she wrote these words: 

MAY 7, 2010 at 4:22PM EST
Matt, like I asked before, how did we ever lose touch? Admittedly, I used to be awful at keeping up with people -- late email responses, missed phone calls, misplaced addresses, and the like. And let's be honest, people drift apart. Friends go their separate ways. it's a natural occurrence, the inertia of which I didn't fight. But I thought of you often. I wondered where you were and what you were doing. I look back at my yearbooks sometimes and fondly stare at the pages onto which you left your mark. Your artwork, the creativity you applied just to write my name. Yours were always my favorite entries. So colorful and alive. Like you. We were all so awkward back in high school. Armed with the braveness and audacity of youth, yet lost and afraid of the unknown, of our futures, of ourselves. I was especially...weird. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Most times, I felt very alone. But having you as a friend made a difference. You made me smile and laugh. you made the really long days bearable. Then we graduated. It's 13 years later, and I regret not trying harder to stay in contact with you. Hey, it's never too late right? I've seen all of you posted photos and they're respective captions. I am so sorry for what you've been through and for the battle you are still fighting. You are so brave, Matt. Last September, I was in a coma, resulting from complications due to chemotherapy. I'm also bald now. I suppose we all have our own problems, our own sources of pain. But we are fighters, you and me. Keep fighting. I hope to hear from you, my friend.

Now, while retyping her message to me for the sake of perpetuity via the ever so accessible blogosphere and cyberwaves, I realize that I should have responded some way simpler than I initially did respond. My first reply was an abrupt, pointed plea for direct, person-to-person communication, live, over the phone. In many ways, I was so intangibly humbled, honored, privileged, « ou comme on dit en français: bouleversé », bent through and through by the bones of me, dramatically empowered, emboldened, impassioned, and empathetic...sorrowfully, shamefully sympathetic...all in one instance, that I could only find it in myself to call out to her as brashly as a boy could begin the volley and tarry of a new dialogue with an old friend, writing:

MAY 7, 2010 at 7:19PM PST
What's your phone number? I would love to talk to you. I have so many thoughts running through my head, so many things I'd like to say to you, to ask you. And, Facebook would only allow me a pitiful tool for expressing myself. You have always been in my thoughts; now you will remain in my prayers. I love you, and I miss you. Even bald, I'm sure you're just as beautiful as ever!! If you don't feel comfortable giving your phone number over email, feel free to check out the INFO Section of my Facebook profile for my phone numbers, address and emails. I hope you will reach out and contact me again, but this time more directly. Looking forward to hearing your voice. Love, your dear ol' friend... Matthew...

Three days have passed since I wrote that speedy, contrite, emotionally bland and bottom-tight message to my long lost, new found friend, and she has yet to have called me or communicate with me outright in any way, which sure as the day is long, worries me in a weird, weird way.  
I've hesitated even meandering through her Facebook profile, for fear of seeing a more recent photo of my truly beautiful boyhood best friend bald now, bare of her long, lank, straight, sleek, sultry, always beaming so black it blinded you, locks of gorgeous hair.  You know, the stuff of which dreams were made.  Like me, however, I know that even bald, she beams boundlessly of beauty beneath the glimmer of her gaze, within, through and surrounding the ecstatic "Elysium" of her eyes.  

SHAME ON ME, DAMMIT ALL!! What ungodly right do I have to be afraid to bear witness to the shedding of mere remembrances. She, herself, had the courage to view my awfully frightening misfortune of a face misshapen by death and disease through then not yet up to date photos chronicling my demise. So, as if to invite her to be reassured of the myriad of blessings which could/should/would befall us, together as friends or apart as individuals -- suffering through nightmarish parallels of conspicuous calamity and chaos, I today uploaded all of the photo portraits taken of me since my sixth surgery. 

These photos include me with and without extensive scarring and stitches, with and without a forehead flap to nose, remaining left with nothing but a mere mutable, more or less monstrous left nostril and lips: "quasi-motor mouth" lips.  Yet, they all capture my own innate beauty in the framing of my expressive, expansive, joyful eyes.  I want so deeply for my dear friend to see beauty in my eyes, if not in my words, written:

MAY 10, 2010 at 8:17PM PST
It's Monday, May 10. Sitting here rereading your most beautiful message to me, with a dear friend at my side. Wallace (WES) Smith is my replacement you. I wish you could meet him. He's an amazing person; much like the person I know you to be: loving, giving, understanding beyond all measure, funny, and above all, happy at just the right moments, and sad with me when I need him to be.

Chances are odd that I would sob tears of sorrow only after reading your message a second time, in the company of a friend. But with him here to witness your undying beauty in words, in pictures, in memories never lost, never forgotten, he invited me to be as open and comfortable with my feelings of regret and remorse as ever I could be or couldn't without him.

When I first read your message, I was struck with an urgent impulse to communicate with you immediately in person, but as that luxury has not presented itself, I've found time to ponder further the feelings I have around the circumstances of your writing to me.

Above all measure, I feel that yes, in fact, we are "FIGHTERS" (as you so gracefully observed), but I see what is happening to us as entirely undeserved and unjust; for that, I am heart-fully sorry.

However, I remain an eternal optimist, as I am sure you do, as well. And, I see in our enduring strength and almost pigheaded determination to outwit destiny (or death -- or whatever one might choose to call that foreboding intent of our Higher Power to outwit us outright ourselves in our hubris), the stamina and true, free will to survive beyond all odds, beyond all measure, beyond all degradation of our innate, inherent beauties.

I don't know much of your story since our senior year of high school, and I can only grasp at a mediocre mindfulness of your present suffering, yet I hear it in your words, behind the echo of a certain righteous trepidation -- something of which I have the most astute familiarity: the voice of fear. Likely also, the voice of regret and shame and injustice.

So, in your words of stamina, strength, sure will, and willingness to self-expose, I find parallels between us that I only wish could have taken different shape or different form.

How are we deserving of such pain, such suffering, one might ask? I once was compelled to cry out to my God in ever bitter bereaving those whys and wherefores of the ways in which the ill reluctantly survive despite the most awful degree of torture: cancer, coma, kidney failure, chemotherapy, catheters, or the cutting and sawing, stapling and screwing, sewing and stitching (or "re-tapestry") of face through disfigurement. Yet, I have ended my bewildered haranguing of my Higher Power, no longer to ask of reasons for my ruination.

I've accepted the injustice, the undeserved destruction of my body, as a solemn soulful, serendipitous enunciation of my own sacred self.



We are more that just fighters. We are, until the day He takes us from our endless enduring pain into ecstatic everlasting Elysium, always and evermore... SURVIVORS!

Survivors of a shared past, shared shame, shared joy and of our own shared, self-construed, self-conscious, self-structured, surreal but earthbound « jardins de paix aux champs elysées ». We are survivors today, just as we will survive tomorrow, whether tomorrow brings us great misery, pain, beauty of bold undying love. We are together survivors of immense, unfathomable, unique sufferance shared.

Together, it is my hope that we... together ...may cry out in our off-chance omniforce of grace and gratitude the quaint and quintessential hymn of our youth. Today, tomorrow, whatever life may lay at our feet, may we hold hands and stumble forward together, singing life's love song -- a simple three-word phrase: "ONWARD AND UPWARD." Always.

Remembering most fondly every beautiful moment we've shared, and not forgetting the ugly patches either, I worship your grace and pay homage to your truly blessed beauty!

Love eternal & with pride,
Gratefully & graciously yours,
Matthew Blanchard
Matt(e)o | QHereKidSF

DEATH IS A FRIEND OF OURS, AND HE THAT IS
NOT READY TO ENTERTAIN HIM IS NOT AT HOME.
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

IF ONE ADVANCES CONFIDENTLY IN THE DIRECTION
OF HIS DREAMS, AND ENDEAVORS TO LIVE THE LIFE
HE HAS IMAGINED, HE WILL MEET WITH A SUCCESS
UNEXPECTED IN COMMON HOURS.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

QHereKidSF's photostream
www.flickr.com
QHerekidSF @ 1/4-Life!! Questions, Quandaries, Conundrums and above
all else, CUTENESS, despite degradation and denigration of face. The
unfathomable fortune and fastidious splendor of spirit shown through the
face of a Fagged-Out Funambulist Freak Show : Mindflux | Matt(e)o |
Mayhem!! Enjoy!

Consequently, I feel most privileged to be able to share this writing with the followers of my blog, and with my Facebook friends. Part of me hesitates to divulge this entirely personal exchange via a blog post, but as I've set out in the past to use this blog as a tool and mechanism for record-keeping, chronicling and creatively expressing my most pungent, potent, putrid and prettily poignant passing pedantry and pontification(s), I will continue down this same route for the sake of posterity and perpetuity.  May these words resound with you, and may they be remembered.  

Who knows? Maybe, with likely permission from my begotten (not forgotten) friend, this dialogue will further develop before the blogosphere, as an intimate exchange intending to touch the hearts of millions. I've so much more to write to this dear friend of mine, as I'm sure she has many more words of wisdom with which to bequeath me in preparation of the inevitable... (i.e., the restoration and rebuilding of our relationship through remembrances, respite and reunification). DOT. DOT. DOT. God Willing! 

So I subtitle this passage: PART ONE, of more to come!!

Hopefully humble,
Humbly hopeful,
Herein and hitherto,
Straight forward to great fortune & fortitude...
Clutching the hands of my best friend(s),
I sing out in privilege and in pride,
ONWARD AND UPWARD! Always.

God willing,
Matt(e)o | QHereKidSF
Matthew D. Blanchard
San Francisco, CA USA
[2010.05.11@00:50PST]

THE DIFFICULTY IS NOT SO GREAT TO DIE FOR A 
FRIEND, AS TO FIND A FRIEND WORTH DYING FOR. 
-- Homer (800BC - 700BC)