Good Times Come to Me Now

2020. Unfuckingbelievable. Another year without my beautiful brother, a brand-new decade he will not see. This never, never, never gets easier.

While on my usual walk home the other day, a random Amir moment crept up on me when this most random of songs popped into my head out of fucking nowhere:

This earworm launched me into an exceptionally clear flashback. The song was inescapable, in near-constant radio rotation, in 1983, when 7-year-old Amir was the ideal age to go bananas for such infectious shit. He may have owned the 45" or maybe he recorded it on a cassette off the radio (as we both did frequently). Either way, he couldn't get enough of it. I can still hear his sweet, high-pitched voice singing it in his room, probably mangling the lyrics but belting it out with an enthusiasm and energy reserved for little kids.

He fucking loved that silly song.

Another thing Amir loved was making lists, a diversion he inherited from me, his list-loving sister. This past weekend, I was thumbing through one of his spiral-bound notebooks, in which he'd recorded sports stats, scoring for Boggle games with friends, random to-do lists, notes to self, etc. Among the pages, I noticed two lists in particular that made my heart sink. One was a playlist of songs, labeled at the top with his nickname for me - likely a playlist he'd wanted to burn to CD for me or otherwise share with me. We had discussed a few of the songs before, but the others were unknown to me and I've now sought them out to add to my library, as he had evidently thought I'd appreciate them. (He was right.)

The other was a list of friends numbering about 10 or 11 and headed by my husband, Jason (who was Amir's friend long before they became brothers-in-law). Everyone was listed in a rather formal manner, by first and last name, including people who'd been his friends since childhood. They were separated into two groups. No family members made the list. 

So, I'm left to forever wonder... what the hell was this list? Amir was not one to send holiday cards or plan gatherings. Were they people he owed money to? People he wanted to get into touch with or re-establish contact with? People who'd borrowed his books or records and hadn't returned them? People who had been there for him in some meaningful way? People who he believed had wronged him somehow? And why two separate groupings?

We will never know. Never. Five years after Amir's death and I still cannot fucking accept the fact that I cannot call or email my brother with random questions. I can't call him to ask some silly bit of music trivia (he was better than Google, in many ways). I can't text him to tell him I just saw a guy on the subway who strangely resembled Bert from Sesame Street. I can't plan a visit with him or look forward to a family gathering with him at the table. The list is endless and it will never get shorter.