Dan and Duncan, I fell head over heels in love with Mikey, as he did with me. Of course it was absolutely platonic, but I have prayed for him every night since my return to the Church, I really did go through the exacting requirements for a plenary indulgence for my friend, even though I have no faith in its efficacy. We were from different worlds, but we had so much in common, Irish music, haunted Catholicism, extraordinary memories, our weakness for the drink which I have survived and he didn't, a flair for performance. We joked that I was the poet of the nineteenth century, and he of the twenty-first; and here I sit without him in the twenty-first. It's a loss from which I shall never recover.
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