Some Guy

Exactly a year ago, en route to an internet date, I bought these earrings. They are the hand of Fathima, or the Hamsa. They are meant to both bestow blessings and ward off evil.

It was that moment between summer and fall. My date and I were in that in-between place between child-rearing and launching post-child lives. He was fiercely intelligent and heartbreakingly funny, one of those misfits who had luckily found a place in life for his unique talents.

I forgot his name before we even met, he was logged into my phone as “some guy”. I suspected he was a personage: he never felt the need to impress; wherever we went people were willing to satisfy his any whim; most of all it was clear he was super fancy because he automatically assumed I knew who he was. I did not. Sometimes it is too late and too awkward to ask a person’s name. In this case it was more amusing not to know.

We became oddly close in that peripheral electronic way men and women have these days — parachuting in and out of one another’s lives with wickedly funny texts and the occasional in-person cocktail. It was that modern liminal state of almost-connection.

So, there we were, two giant awkward teenagers giggling through our shared wicked online humor. We were too confounded by our ridiculous middle-aged bodies and cratered emotional history to pursue what would have been a foregone conclusion a decade or so earlier. I hesitated between the Hamsa of protection or blessing, and so never conferred that bit of immortality men always want from women.

I learned his name when I read it in the papers a few weeks ago. He was, indeed, a well-known person. He had died of a rare cancer. We had shared our brushes with death, so his illness was no surprise.

Just days before I read the obituary I had been resisting his wheedling for sexting from his hospital bed — sending instead photos of lavishly overweight courtesans or terrifying nuns. I knew he was in the hospital; I had no way to know he was near the end.

Farewell, my friend ‘Some Guy’. My all of us always grace the presence of even those we barely know, as we did one another. May the hand of Fatima continue to shield and bless you on your afterlife journey — may you know the open palm of blessing more often than the closed hand of protection.

In the midst of living there is death. In the midst of dying there is life.