It’s Jason Polan’s birthday. Happy birthday, bud. I’m back in Brooklyn now, but spent last weekend in the Bay Area. In many years previous, Jason would have come stay with us for the SF Art Book Fair and other shenanigans. We’d go for ice cream. Steve would make pizza in the backyard. “Nice leoparding!” Jason would comment, admiring the swirls of char on the bottom of the pie. Steve’s never been prouder. Jason would sketch at our dining table. This year, we were hosting visitors from Germany. They were intent on seeing Fisherman’s Wharf, which lately seems to have a proliferation of magnet shops for some reason. There was a wall packed full of soft sculpture ones: bananas, donuts, hamburgers: all were nearly the size of a fist and discomfitingly squishy in your hand. I would have bought Jason the hamburger one, or at least sent him a goofy photo where I pretended to bite into it. A few doors down there was a shop with those mini versions of California license plates. The one emblazoned JASON jumped out at me immediately. All this is to say that more than five years on, I still miss my friend so much. I still cry about him, and the unfairness of it all. I still have moments where I catch a glimpse of someone who I’m absolutely sure is him on the street, and feel my heart flush with the love I feel for him. I see things, or read things and want to call and tell him about it. I still do all these things, and always will. It is something that will always be tinged with sadness, and loss, but over time it’s also transformed into something I (not a religious person) can only describe as holy. I feel a gratitude to have shared so much with him, to still have him so much with me. To be able to remember his voice, the exact way in which a certain tooth was a little crooked, the way his fingers curved as he held a pen in his hand to make a drawing. All the things he loved and hated, or was curious about. What a privilege to have known him so well, and to have wandered the world with him as much as we did. It wasn’t for long enough, but gosh, I’m so grateful to have had the chance to be alive with him, to love him and to be loved by him. — Jen