Michael Paul Schneider

Like snowfall
you arrived.
Soft, tiny
melting upon landing.
You kept coming,
covering the ground around me,
making everything
white.

My first time 
embracing winter.
My first time 
welcoming the cold.
My last time falling,
finally,
like snow covering
the ground.

Lindsey and Dave celebrate five years this week. Adding on the years of dating, that’s seven years I’ll never have for you.
It’s seven years I’ve spent rambling, tracing road maps and watching the sun pass over my head. Does it know the distance from me to you?
Today was another day I’ve kept, selfish, still knowing fully you could have it if you wanted to.
If you’re there, and you’re reading, please come and take tomorrow. Go with me and make it the first day we went together. Tell me stories of your seven years, or just seven days because we have the rest of them to be.
If you’re there, and you’re reading know that I am hopeful. Today, or tomorrow, or seven more years from now, I’ll be waiting patiently. I’ll meet you with all my days remaining, one by one with you.

Dad,

I begin this with a forewarning, that the following will be very selfish. I’m in a rental car in Orlando, you’re at work in downtown Seattle. There are few ways that more distance could be between us, domestically at least. Sitting here in a central Florida rainstorm, I’m now sure of why this move to NYC is most difficult, and honestly- it’s you. It’s mom. It’s Lindsey and Dave and Kimberly and Steven and this crippling fear that ill get more bad news over the phone. And here’s the selfish part…

I need you to do everything possible to make sure that doesn’t happen.

I need you to be healthy. I need you to finally get glasses that will help you see. I need you to change up your habits and what you eat. I need you to take better care of yourself.

I need all this because I need you.

I need all this because mom needs you. And Lindsey does and Kimberly does and Steven does and we need you to be the best you that’s possible. I need you because I’m terrified of not having the chance to call you and ask some stupid question about taxes or cell phones when all I really wanted was just to hear your voice. I need to be able to come home and fall asleep to keystrokes on your computer next door. I even need the times we get mad at each other because of getting lost or taking wrong turns.

I just need you. 

I know what I’m saying is selfish but I’ll never need another gift again if you can do this for me, for you, for us. Okay?

love, michael

You are the oxygen in this burning house I keep as home. You are the echo in this room built for solitude and silence. Hopeful like a year made of New Years Days, still all I am is pain repeating. 

What did you intend for me? 

You knew I would revel in the shallows. You knew I would holdfast to vices & voids. You knew I would keep you at a distance. I once offered inches and you took every mile.

I need another drink so I don’t start crying again. This bar echos songs that mirror my insides. I know she’ll be okay, but being born without a father…I may be able to relate. 
Mixed drinks will keep me company, a double. One for me and one for you. Another for your wife, your little boy, your unborn baby girl. 
ill always take the sad over the numb. Sadness is, at the least, a veil. 

Sean is playing a song for his baby boy, and I know it’s really you.

“Let your innocence reign, for one last refrain, before I kiss your face goodnight.”

My mom said it doesn’t make sense, and that makes me feel better because my mother knows everything there is to know, and if she doesn’t know I sure as hell can’t know. And no momma, this doesn’t make any sense at all.

“Death says hello are you ready to go…I can’t go yet without my son.”

Yesterday was supposed to be the first day of spring, but winter kept his hold on us. So lets drink, to you, and to the longest winter.

I expected his message to be plans for Austin. Everyone has so many plans- parties, shows, even anti-parties where you get massages and it’s quiet on purpose. This was anything but quiet.

A favor, if I knew anyone that could help introduce his little sister to her favorite singer because it’s all she really wanted after the news she got last year. 

I don’t know a God damn thing about cancer. I say God and I say damn because they are loud and I know that God damns cancer, and it felt like in this sense it’s okay to damn it if we were doing it together.

I don’t know what stage 3 means, I know the word inoperable and tumor together are bad and I know that people aren’t supposed to prepare for the end at twenty two years old. 

I remember all the kids I met on tour who were battling things like this. I don’t remember just one of them, I have to go through every single memory I have and recount how happy they were watching their favorite band or just being out in the sun for once. The noise gets even louder when I realize it’s possible, actually probable, that some of them are no longer fighting anymore.

So what do you do when your friend says sister and cancer and help? Because I smoked my last two cigarettes so that, for ten minutes, life would make perfect sense and no sense at the exact same time. God Damn.

“could you help me breathe again?” My lungs have been polluted with nicotine and her exhalation. She says there’s so much hope here, but i suppose my view is filtered. The secondhand creates a hue that makes it all look dismal…gray. I already left home once because of contrast. 
I want, just for once, to remember what a wildfire feels like. I want to remember what its like to wake up shameless. 
cigarettes, booze, carbon dioxide…could you help me breathe again? 

Oh foolish boy, look what you’ve done. The ground is covered with ice and snow and you wander with your boots around your neck. Frostbite, your first and only feeling since you left hope disintegrating.

Oh foolish boy. Hiding in the woods, friend to the trees and the wolves. Why do you forget your mother, your father, your sisters and your brother? 

But foolish boy, solitude won’t save you. You won’t find fulfillment…freedom in the forest. 

Foolish boy, I knew that I would find you here.

Settled in that old brick theatre, songs echo off the walls as if we’re all blind, guided only by the sound to providence. I might as well have my eyes shut, each verse sets my course better than any atlas ever could.
You are beside, incandescent, a welcomed reminder to be thankful I can see, as what an awful fortune it would be to not witness you. I wonder of your proclivity, where the symphony will lead, if the chorus could keep us.
Do you hear it, love? Do you hear the harmony you breathe?

You approached with a red umbrella, my hands numb and jacket holding rain like a drought was looming.

“England weather has gone mad again! Have you a light?”

Your hand-rolled cigarette now victim of your crimson lipstick lit up like a firework and you glowed along with it. Paired with your evergreen eyes, February looked just like Christmas Eve.

“Does that umbrella of yours have room for two?”

Waves hit the shore softly, their lifetime culminating in a performance unadvertised, not dependent on an audience to show. We bore witness as unsuspecting judges, holding our breath to not interrupt their final moments, silently fulfilled. I’ve seen waves before, but only from an ocean. And there, in front of the sea, the moonlight, the sand and the stars, I felt captivated. Maybe it was the sea holding, overwhelming me, but maybe it was you.

I am a gourd and tonight is hallow’s haunting eve,
you’ve gone and hollowed out all that was inside of me.
Take me down and out from this shallow dark display,
take away the smile you once had loved to make.
Take me from this hardened shape, and smash me to my grave
Take my remnants from the ground and sweep my walls away.
As I am just a widower, love was my lovely bride,
you’ve gone and left no trace behind, you’ve left nothing here inside
And it haunts me like you’re still beside, I know we have no further life.
No, no, we have no further life, gone away my lovely bride.

I am a body, bones and flesh, my warmth is mechanical.
I am a replica, self-medication in dangerous form. 
I am an accomplice, sorrow as a weapon.

but you could still bloom, your roots endure
you could still bloom, without winter’s cloak 
you could still bloom, if you leave me here

I did my best to stop the trees, the turning colors of their falling leaves, they look a lot like us.
We are dying day by day, heading straight for our graves, but oh, so beautiful.
The paper said we don’t get to remain, the world is going to end today, so would you stay tonight?

Cause darling, we’re just falling leaves, bold against the canvas of green.
You are yellow, warm and bright and I, a mix of crimson and spite.

Growing up, our home was always filled with little kids. My mom ran a daycare almost as soon as she left work to begin raising the four of us, and I’m certain at any given time there were at least 3-5 extra children in the house. When we’d come home from school my mom would have a look on her face that was somewhat mischievous, telling us that all our rooms had a little one sleeping in them, at times wetting the bed smelling up the room with a diaper that needed changing. However, my mom’s daycare was something that really changed my life. I can still, even now more than a decade later, remember helping them learn to walk, talk, eat…I remember names, faces, stories, and moments- at three years old, one of the kids even told her mother she wanted her new baby sister to be named “Michael Schneider.”

As we got older, it made less sense to do the daycare as most of the time there were lots of activities my mother had to take care of for the four kids who she had all day, not just half of it. As we began to graduate and go off to college, my mom maid the decision to become a para-educater, essentially, to work with the kids that couldn’t handle normal classroom environments for a variety of reasons. She teaches at a junior high school near our home in Seattle. What happened on Friday was across the country from her, but as someone who over thinks everything, it didn’t feel that way.

I also know, without a doubt, elementary school teachers have the biggest hearts. I know because I watched a woman I loved become one. I watched as she did the tests, the extra school, the long hours of ‘student teaching,’ and the heartbreak when things got tough. These days, I don’t get to know her heart anymore, and what happened on Friday was across the country from her. As someone who over thinks everything, it just didn’t feel that way.

As someone who over thinks, I didn’t see twenty names of children I’d never met, I saw the daycare - meghan, seth, ariah, ellie, nick & max…

As someone who over thinks, I didn’t see pictures of unfamiliar faces- I saw my mom, my teachers, and her.

I don’t know why I’m writing this, or what I hope to accomplish by it. I suppose I just need to write it down. I need to use words to understand that Newtown is just like Kenmore. That 20 year old kid, could be any of the kids my mom works with - any of the kids I’ve met when I worked in the mental health sector. These teachers…they’re mothers, friends, daughters, wives, and these children are our sons and our daughters, our brothers and our sisters. They’re ours.

I don’t have any resemblance of a solution, an action plan, a list of things that should happen. Just a list of names that I go through over and over, that I will always remember and always pray for. I don’t have anything profound or poetic to say, just a stomach in knots, and a heart like an anchor.

you’re going to work too much, take up smoking, and listen to a lot of sad music. then you’re going to begin to notice that you dont find your happiness in anything thats holding you down. you’ll start to become new again, and that whole time i will be right here.

You picked her up like a daisy, beautiful and bright. Each petal a different piece of her. And like a child pondering the possibility of first love, you began to rip her apart. “She loves me?” Away went hands that God made for holding, a finger made for a ring molded by commitment. “She loves me not” and off came forearms where I once traced  freckles with my fingertips.

But you, you manipulative piece of shit. Your hands bear no safety, only continuity: demolish, disrupt, dismantle, destroy.

There you were in the midst of chaos and celebration. With a smile so sincere, I found it abrasive. I was once like a tumbleweed, moved by the slightest breeze, a nomad. You arrived wearing boots made of concrete, and held me stagnant. 

On the day we met, you wore yellow and I was unprepared. There is proof that we existed together in photographs you’ve long since forgotten. Maybe, Autumn will set us free. 

“you think you’re the only one experiencing pain today?” 

A glaring internal retort to the unwarranted tears streaming down my face. When you feel everything around you, it’s hard to remember how to go numb when the hurt comes from within. Today was not like any other day, more news delivered via iMessage…more words that float like anchors. 

The lighter in my hand becomes a safe place, light, release, light, release, the closest I’ve felt to control. Maybe, I’ll finally get a tattoo.

The sadness turns briefly to anger…anger that I didn’t appreciate the days with no bad news. Anger at myself for not keeping everyone safe, as if somehow I could do that. The sadness is back and the tears are back because I can’t. 

And if these words were going into your ears you’d be able to hear the shakiness and you’d know how I hate that phrase because there has to be a way that I can fix it. There has to be something I can do. 

In restlessness, in fear, somehow I imagine myself at the ocean. The waves are crashing on a rocky beach and I bear witness to the collision of forces much bigger than me. Will You find me here?