Fitzgerald

You died four days before Christmas - the Winter Solstice - both the day and the life a falling short.

Your going not tragedy but disappointment, as though the shadow you lived with had survived to see you buried, then drunk itself to death.

The words you had lived with slipped back into the language, but were never the same. Every time your book is opened they return for a reunion, their nostalgia staining the pages white.

And we learned to trade in the pure ghosts of jazz, our longings trapped forever between achievement and possibility, destiny and desire.

Sixty seven years later, and two days too late, I mourn your death. And it seems to me that this too is justified - as though melancholy were half-precision and half-dream; as though a promise didn't have to be made, to be broken.

[F. Scott Fitzgerald died on Dec 21st, 1940. He was 44.]