Jared Dawson and Aubrey Longley-Cook have worked with Loverboy a few times and it’s always magic….but then what else would expect from a self-proclaimed warlock and his BFF? Last week the pair spent the day at the beach and took a coupla snaps just for us. But first Jared wanted to put pen to paper and write a tribute to his best friend…
“. . .once your life has jumped the track, where is the way home? Once hatred blows up the law of love on your dear one’s face, how do you return to conversation? Fictionally. You make something resembling blood. If there were a way home it would be a mystery, Flannery O’Connor might say. No use trying to prattle your way into mystery. But tell what you see, tell what the blood was like, and maybe a gesture will form. Probably unbearable. Certainly unclean. And then you will go ahead with your exile.”
-Anne Carson from “Unsaid”
Aubrey Longley-Cook became my roommate quite by accident. I had been dating his roommate for several months and we had bonded over video games and cartoons. Their lease ended and he had nowhere to lay his ginger head, so he moved into our sun porch – “the genie’s bottle,” he called it, just large enough for his bed and a desk; two French doors that looked out over the backyard, full of hens gently calling out to each other. Aubrey and I spent the lion’s share of the next decade living with each other. Through houses, and jobs, and boys, and cars, he was the one constant and here is something that I learned. Love sneaks up on you and finds a corner of your heart and colonizes it. One day you are surprised to find life and fullness in an internal landscape that was once arid and rocky.
We have been socialized to believe that the loves of our lives are large and grand, seemingly supernatural influxes that wreck us and leave us forever altered. What about the loves that are like earth’s moon, ever present and gently pulling – a natural process akin to the ebb and tide of our oceans.
Aubrey Longley-Cook, I have loved you working together at the kitchen table over coffee. I have loved you, falling asleep on the living room floor watching “Murder, She Wrote.” I have loved you in waiting for the bathroom in the morning and through stealing the last of your milk or toothpaste. “If there were a way home, it would be a mystery,” but here’s what I see; here’s what the blood is like. Home, as a space and concept has always been a loaded subject for me since my Baptist family gave me the boot, but you have taught me that Home is where you’re never out of context. Home is where you’ve got nothing to prove. Home is where the player two controller is waiting for you. Home is where the kitchen floor is covered in flour from your making banana bread. Home is where you pay my utilities when money is tight. Home is this afternoon here on the beach with you. Thousands of miles from where I pay rent. Months from when I last saw you. Home is the gesture that forms.
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