Life After Jeff

Last New Year’s Eve I went to my friend’s tiny tea house in Los Feliz. Jeff came, it took a little convincing– but the tea house was low pressure. Warm woods, Eno on vinyl, soft lighting that rounded all the edges, perfect ceramic pots of tea. Every detail thought out to soothe.  The kind of place where time bends. A portal. He sat next to me, on my left, at the head of the large table in the center of the room.

I try to picture him there all the time. If I close my eyes, sometimes I can remember his laugh and my heart feels like it weighs fifty pounds. Deep slow exhale. I looked right at him at midnight as Ben came around from the other side of the table to kiss me, and that look is easier to recall. It floats there in my memory, haunting me. It was a brief moment, but he let the mask slip. An absence of the usual glint in his eye, no easy half-smile. I don’t know what he saw when he looked back at me. 

We played this game called The Mind, where the group has to “become one” and wins, collectively, by tapping into the table’s consciousness without words or gestures– you must place numbered cards down on the table in increasing order.  We got into it,  but Jeff’s brain was busy all night trying to figure out a way to hack the game. He insisted, if everyone could count in their heads, in sync– you could rhythmically predict when to put down your card. He kept showing me, mouthing 1…2…3 while lightly tapping on the table. This, of course, ruins the entire magic of the game. Nerves, risk, synchronicity, chance. But while deeply mystic, heady, and generally far out in some ways, Jeff was the biggest control freak I have ever met. 

Life has felt very out of control since he’s been gone. The idea that one day you can get the deepest, warmest embrace from someone at the end of a magical night, and 3 days later they will vanish, makes no sense at all. One year later my brain still can’t really comprehend it. It must have been 2 am when we sat in our corner, sharing a pot of kuromojicha- Japanese spice bush tea. Its aroma is unmistakably citrusy with some herbal wood– like the branches of mature lavender or rosemary. Our friend calls it “frazzled mom tea” because linalool, the main compound in the tea, seems to almost immediately calm the nervous system as soon as it enters your nose. Deep slow inhale. Stillness, silence. Just me and my friend.

If there is anything you truly cannot control, it is grief. It is as if the universe is playing The Mind with me. A phrase, a melody– moments that feel placed, not random. Cards laid down by an intelligence I can’t see. I don’t know if it’s him, or the part of me that can’t stop tracing his outline in the world, but sometimes the timing is too precise to ignore. For a single beat, I can feel him again on the end of the table, tracking the rhythm with me. 

But mostly, Jeff’s hack falls apart. There’s no pattern, no whisper of him in the margins– just absence. A void. There is no counting your way through it, anticipating when the next card will drop. So I try to do my best to surrender, to free fall into feeling. To risk taking everything from this blip of time I have. To feel pain fully, trusting– or trying to trust– that pleasure still awaits on the other side. The quiet thrill of not knowing and moving anyway.

A movie night at Jeff’s last December