It Would Have Been Your 41st Birthday

Dear Lolly,
 
Today we would have been celebrating your life, if cancer hadn’t weaved itself through your body, and ended your time on this earth prematurely. Our friendship would have spanned 21 years, no small feat. I don’t know that I will ever stop feeling your absence as an empty hole inside my heart. Not a day passes that you don’t drift into my thoughts, and I often feel it is your spirit’s way of communicating, so I listen for your twangy words echoing around me. Ever so gently and yet with fervor, you constantly whisper: don’t hold back.
 
Don’t hold back:
Pursuing what you want, creating your own happiness, and recognizing when to put yourself first.
Dreaming fantastic, outrageous aspirations that put you at the center of everything you feel you deserve.
Being decisive.
Hugging and telling those closest to you every day how much you love and care for them.
Satisfying your needs, be they material, physical, spiritual, intellectual or emotional.
Telling people when they have hurt you and need to do better.
Taking care of the delicate, amazing body you have been given to inhabit.
Buying that handbag or dress that makes you feel oh so good.
Falling in lust or love, or anything in between.
Loving every single second of the precious, precarious life you have been granted, and taking everything it brings with open arms.
Celebrating for no reason.
Making difficult decisions that have your best interests at heart.
Becoming instant friends with total strangers.
Saying ‘yes’ to all the things that terrify you, or seem too risky to initiate.
Taking as many selfies and photos as you can to document your joy.
To please, comfort, or conform to others.
Sharing your stories, your journey, your wild and wonderful life.
Giving less than all you are in everything you do or touch.
 
I love you to pieces, still…always.
 
H

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