"No Tighter Wish"

I miss Lisa "Left-eye" Lopes so much.

One of the hardest emotions I have to get through is that of missing someone. I'm often missing family members that have passed away, memories that cannot be recreated, feelings and experiences that were so alive to me at one point and are not lost in the oblivion which is the past. I miss my childhood and the innocence I had so easily and the security afforded by my mom and my family. I miss people who were once a part of my life but our relationship has since soured (like Alan, Michael, George) or vanished (Mimi). Sometimes, just that moment...it all is too much to endure sometimes.

I was talking to my friend Bobby today via text, and I was telling him about how I miss when we were really cool, back when I used to hang out in his room with him and John and we'd be so caught up in the Word, or whatever, and how Bobby and I were so close we would actively seek each other out, confide in one another, and have a genuine fraternal love for one another that evolved into something much more complicated. The things I associate with him: Spanish, biscuits, Cosmics (the DURHAM one, baby), devotion...loss of faith. We're cool now, but man, what I'd give to be able to go back and retrace some steps so that those same emotions would never have left.

Hearing the new Left-Eye posthumous album, I think about how I was so into TLC, and how she was my favorite member, and how I admired her for being able to speak her mind and step out against her sisters in order to define an identity that was her own. I remember hearing about her death, and I cried for someone who I never knew personally. When that "Rock Docs" documentary came out a few years ago, filled with clips from her video diary when she was in Honduras, it was like she was back again with the same charm and pizazz that made me fall in love with her the first time. Yet seeing how she died in that, and thinking about how art like hers won't be around again...and listening to the song on this page which I happened to stumble across a few weeks ago, I can't help but feel the void, the regrets, the sadness, and I wonder where all those good feelings went.

I know that there are good times ahead, and the gap between childhood and adulthood has been filled with some incredible experiences. I've matured a lot in the last few years, and I think it has to do primarily with being so removed from what made me comfortable, minus a few exceptions (key friends, my family, God), but I wish that there was some assurance that would allow me to rest comfortably knowing that those good feelings will come back in full force, or even that I would somehow have the opportunity that revisit some of those hurts, with the value of retrospect, and handle them differently so that they'd work out for my good.

Damn.