Picture Day started on a Piano.

And the line ” what if you dressed up in your Sunday Best, would it change you?”

I immediately began to wonder what that meant.

It wasn’t long (minutes) before I thought of Pat, my dear friend who committed suicide just a year or so before.

What if in spite all our efforts, would the drive to end life supercede all else?

The concept is heartbreaking, and I must admit it’s been weighing on me for years now, given that I’ve been privy to a few friend’s suicides in the past say 5-6 years. It’s like that phrase, the terrorists always win, or the phrase ‘if someone wants to get into your house, they’re gonna break in somehow.”

You can put up all the possible alarms and all the preventative measures, and still they will succeed if their drive is strong enough.

So, then what…do…you do?

I just began to wonder, just that…if I can’t change your mind, then the only control I have is to tell you how I feel. How much I love you, how much I’ll miss you (or already do if in the past). How I wish I could understand, and how I wish there was something I could have said. But since there isn’t, my love is what you’re going to get from me.

There still remain people in my life who I worry about (taking their lives). I know some of them are well beyond my ability to stop if they choose to go that route. So I’ve opted for a different position: just let them know, I don’t judge them, that I will always love them, and if they ask, I’ll certainly tell them how it’ll make me feel.

Cause that’s how helpless it feels to lose someone this way, and often, that’s about all we can do. Love.

Sonically, I wrote the drum part as a switch between half-time and double time. It had an old fashioned flair to it. That’s probably why I went down the honkey tonk piano road (after listening to a particular Bowie song); I wanted to couch this wistful melancholy song about a friend I would soon lose and only have the memories of their photos to remind me:

“Wondering what happened, did we lose the sweetest of souls?”