Two birthdays past

This day is still hard… it probably always will be. I woke up feeling heavy and sad. But I’m so glad it’s a holiday (celebrating dead white presidents, but I’ll take it) and I can spend the entire day thinking about him and sharing memories with Sheila and Jean.

Today I’m thinking of two February 19ths with Mike: 2011 and 2014.

2011

This birthday fell right on the heels of our breakup. It wasn’t your average breakup… we didn’t have a huge fight (though we had plenty of those along the way), we’d just known for a while that we wanted very different things in life. It was a mutual decision nearly two years in the making, and we knew it was necessary for both of us. I was on board, in theory.

At the same time, it felt just a little bit more like him leaving me. It was very hard, and I find that many details about that time are difficult to remember.

Thankfully, just last year a friend was able to help me recover old pics from a long-defunct laptop I’d been saving. It turned out to hold a gold mine of memories, pics that help me piece these days back together.

By this date in 2011 — his 40th birthday — I was still trying like hell to be “just friends,” because I couldn’t stand the idea of not having him in my life. We’d still hug and hold hands, call each other “baby.” We still laughed a lot, constantly cracked ourselves up with our endless supply of inside jokes. So I did what I would usually do on his birthday.

“Hey, can I treat you to Denny’s?” Another inside joke, because Denny’s. Free Grand Slam breakfast on your birthday.

We met up at the skeezy San Francisco Denny’s on Mission Street. The food and atmosphere were jankier than ever, but hell, it was a free breakfast, and Mikey loved a free breakfast. I think for him it kind of felt like putting one over on The Man. Also, he was uncomfortable with people treating him.

And later in the day we (apparently) got oysters and cupcakes to go, then continued the celebration at his apartment on Geary. Oysters were kind of our thing (not because of that… several of our earliest dates in 2008 had involved scarfing down a few dozen oysters at Hog Island. I think our record was four dozen: two apiece).

I think on that day in 2011 we had picked up the oysters from Swan’s Oyster Depot on Polk Street, which wasn’t far from his apartment. The desserts may have come from nearby Bob’s Donuts, now that I think about it. Those two old SF institutions, along with the site of our first date, Red Devil Lounge on Polk, are now all gone.

Sometime after that, I had to tell him that I needed time, that I couldn’t be in touch for a while. I knew it was the only way we could hope to be friends again, if I could get myself past the worst of the pain.

I knew that not being in touch had been hard for him too. Much later, years later, after he had moved to Oakland, he asked if I had ever gone past his apartment in those early days, if I’d seen the sign in his window. What sign? I asked. No. I avoided going that way.

He had put up “I miss you” in his sixth-floor window, hoping that I would see it. Maybe from the 38-Geary bus, but I had avoided that bus. I didn’t believe him when he told me, but he had taken a pic, probably knowing that I wouldn’t believe him.

For me, it took about six months of not speaking to him to get to a place of acceptance. It worked. One night when I was doing laundry at the laundromat near my place, I looked over and saw the back of someone who looked like him. I was constantly thinking I spotted him in the neighborhood, at Trader Joe’s or by the lake, but it was never him, so I didn’t dare hope. But the way this person was tossing clothes into the dryer — slow aim, powerful toss — yeah, that was definitely him.

I walked up with a huge smile on my face. I couldn’t help it. He turned and grinned, that grin that makes the whole world suddenly okay, and wrapped his arms around me. We stayed in touch after that and would meet up regularly for food in the neighborhood, or he’d come out with me and my friends or my sisters when they were in town. We kept each other updated on all the hard things happening in our lives (so many). We were friends.

2014

February 19, 2014. We hadn’t spoken for a few months, not because we weren’t getting along, we just each had our own stuff to deal with. That day I decided to text him happy birthday. I was out of sorts and missing him, hoped he was doing okay.

Within an hour, walking back to my apartment, before I knew what was happening I found myself taking a bite out of the sidewalk and fighting off an attacker. My phone, wallet, and keys sped off with a stranger in an SUV with tinted windows. I was lucky in that it was only a broken tooth and a few scrapes on my face and hands and knees.

Later, I emailed Mike to let him know I’d lost my phone, in case he had texted me back and wondered why I didn’t reply. I didn’t say how.

The next day, he called me on my landline to find out what happened, and when I told him, he was beside himself. “My baby.” He was near tears. “I should have been there to protect you!” Even if we had been together, of course no one would never expect that he could always be there. But that’s how he was with everyone he loved. He wanted to keep us all safe. It was one of the hardest things for him when he got sick later… knowing he wouldn’t be able to physically protect us if something terrible happened.

He insisted on driving me to my dental appointment in SF. My tooth had to be removed and preparations made for an implant to be placed by an oral surgeon. That night, he took me to dinner at Fenton’s in Oakland. He knew I was self-conscious about my missing tooth, so he got us a seat facing the back wall. He cut up my grilled cheese for me. A strange foreshadowing of what was to come for him.

To lighten things up, he propped up his phone so we could watch a video he’d recently taken of his nephew Ryan, who would have been, what, three at the time? They were goofing around and he was making Ryan laugh that adorable giggle he had.

I felt loved and cared for. Safe. I’ll never forget it.

I still say to this day that our strangely amicable breakup was meant to be. Years later when the unthinkable diagnosis presented itself, we had built up an other-worldly bond that would allow us to go through this terrible thing together, helping each other through it, propping each other up.