The Things I Brought You
On “A Portrait for Tomorrow” by Raynarde
Most of the books on my shelves have come from thrift stores and estate sales. Someone’s curated shelves built up over a lifetime. Works that clearly had some importance to their owner, now handed down to me. The best is when these objects reveal their history, chicken scratch annotations and highlighted passages you can try to parse out derived meaning from. Somewhere, in this body of work, is the life of someone who is now gone. And I often wonder how my own collection will be passed on too.
The transcendent personage of art is so profoundly captured in Raynarde’s “A Portrait for Tomorrow,” which suffuses life back into the artifacts of the past. His writing is filled with the maximalist name-drops only a fanatic can ring off. Band names, artistic eras, roman mythology, all singularly strung together to unfold his characters piece by piece. Michael, a folk loving fox undaunted by a returned cancer diagnosis with the aid of his new companion Gerald, our central anxious lion balancing an artistic exhibition with the uncertainty of his future.
For a book that opens with a funeral and ends with a wedding, it reminds us to memento mori, but to never let the grief overtake us. The beauty the author enfolds into the day-to-day details transforms this heavy read into something life affirming and truly powerful. “A Portrait for Tomorrow” is one of those rare, special works of art that pitches straight into your heart and stays with you. A work to help guide you in processing the complications in life.
Raynarde’s writing is meticulous in listing the details he so clearly has affection for. In the deep cuts he pulls from the shelf and through the descriptions of Florida, so evocatively captured in sun laden beaches and humid restaurants. The most striking specificities are between our two characters, written with such a powerful subjective desire from our point of view, Gerald, that the love radiates beyond the pages. There is poetry here in the specific mundanity and that makes up a life, and the mannerisms that make up a life.
All this is fitting for a book dedicated to
“… the artists, dreamers, and free thinkers, both living and dead.”
The objects here are beyond stifled nostalgia. It’s a vision of art as an emotional wire that transcends beyond death. Bolstered by Michael’s musical depth as a member of a cover band called, “The Currents,” a double entendre both for the energy each artist brings and the act of artistic creation as existing in the present. What better than a cover band to invoke a sense of renewed love for the works of the past, an act of adaptation painted by a new perspective. Each album that Michael refers to creates the fullness of his life, creating the image of him we slowly find. And art, for both Michael and Gerald, is the safe space for them to put their unprocessed feelings into something speakable.
If optimism is the front that Michael puts on during his cancer diagnosis, Gerald is the nervous pragmatist always thinking of the ending. A character I related to, as someone who admittedly has a bad habit of having to read the last page before I start a book to know if things will be okay, (Which I did NOT do this time, very bravely).
Despite Michael’s perseverance that he will beat his diagnosis, the tragedy of losing the person he has just so recently fallen in love with is always under the surface for Gerald. Mixed with the similar tragedy of a past ex cheating on him, a negative voice lives in his mind that the end is always certain, everyone leaves.
Gerald is so often fatalistic in his certainty. In a poignant moment during a date at a fair, in a room full of mirrors, Michael and Gerald consider the multiverse potential of their lives. Imagining the ones they could have lived spiraling out beyond them.
“‘Maybe they’re assholes in their universe because they haven’t found each other…’
At that, I grew sad for our echoes. The idea that I’d have never met Michael was a reality I was thankful not to be in, but I pitied the possible versions of me that were still alone. Maybe there was an alternate reality where I’d moved away. Maybe Mom would be alive and the trajectory of my life would be vastly different. Where would that have left Michael? Alone to die? Or maybe there was a universe where he doesn’t die.
‘I just want to be in the universe where I get to spend the rest of my life with you,’ I said.
‘You already are,’ Michael said with such confidence that I believed to be true.”
This is the push and pull between this couple, one damning the future as cruel and the other imagining the beautiful possible. Neither perspective can be answered except through the act of daily living. A portrait for tomorrow is itself only made stroke by stroke, the accumulation of the present to create meaning for the future.
Later in the fairground, while Gerald discusses how to address his father’s alcoholism, ever the artist he asks, “‘But what if he doesn’t want to change? I asked, ‘What if he’s stuck in his role as a drunk…?’” (The same categorical term “Role” is used often) Michael is the one to remind Gerald to provide his father the grace to change. What seems inevitable is never actually set. Nothing is written, as much as we artists like to believe in the supremacy of semiotics.
It’s his progress in completing the unfinished 5-piece painting series his late mother left behind that pushes the plot forward. In a near “Picture of Dorian Gray” manner, the artwork depicting a warrior lion and a bard fox coming together in mutual healing becomes almost a symbolic destiny for Gerald, who puts more of his life into the paintings and fears the superstition of what its creation will bring out. But as the progress unfolds, and the final piece is left entirely to him, it’s no longer the work he fears will seal the ending but instead champions his future.
All this takes place in the year 2012, itself infamous for its apocalyptic myth as the end of the world, and its turn towards the new year. One that only had potential for Gerald, strictly to be lived.
“Whatever was bound to happen, good or bad, momentous or mundane, it was bound to be a year that would stick with me for the rest of my life.”
Spoilers Below
Please skip if you have not read the book.
If you haven’t, go read it it’s very good.
Ok, Got it?
The last few chapters of this book were difficult to press through. The ending is set for us by page 176, with 60 pages left to read. I myself was racked with guilt unable to sleep., fearing that I would have to let Michael die the next day by turning the pages. I nearly stopped reading, nearly through the book across the room. But I couldn’t do that for the characters that had been so profoundly affecting me for the weeks I’d been reading this book.
In the way a good work invokes questions with you, I found a painful thought in me asking, if you only knew someone for 1 brief year and at such a young age, is that love even real? And the book guided me through this brutal grief in these final chapters,
yes.
Every second of love we can infuse into the world is infinitely worthwhile. The energy that exists is never destroyed, it transcends itself. It lives in us and in our art. We are made up of the ones we love, and we must carry their legacy onward.
To quote Gerald,
“I figured that going into the future that the people we leave behind in the past were gone. Locked away forever. But that’s not true.
Michael told me he was with me every step forward into life, and sitting on the beach then confirmed it: Michael was stillI with me.
…I could hear his feet in the grass. Feel his warmth from the sun. His touch in the wind. I carried his wisdom and spread it in my conversations and acts. Despite the cues of my lover’s absence, I had many memories with him. Gratitude that, despite the short time I had with Michael, I was lucky to have had him in my life at all.”
Michael’s death is not the ending of this book. He was not our protagonist, Gerald is. And he will live on. This story was 236 pages of his life. The brief time he met and fell in love with a fox that changed the trajectory of his life forever. It was staring at me from the cover the whole time, (beautifully depicted by Logan Volkmann, I must compliment). The objects that made up Michael’s life, his records, lyrics, and a lock of tail fur, exist to carry his legacy in the people he loved. The ones that reciprocated that love back to him when he needed it and filled his final moments.
Raynarde’s book will sit on my shelf along with all the other works of art pushing me to take another step forward, day by day. When I need to, I will call back on it when the grief returns into my life. And it will remind me to keep going. To see out another day. To never give up on love and to bring it with me into the future. For as painful as it was to read, (and believe me, it got fucking painful), it’s a book that has taught me a lot about life, death, and love. It still sends shivers in my heart when I think about it, both grieving the story and rejoicing in the memories so beautifully caught onto paper. Much like Gerald, I’m truly grateful to have had the time to experience it.
Art is not dead objects on the shelves, suffocated by nostalgia. Memories are not permanent visions of the past; they are malleable emotions for the present. This is all the living collective consciousness we adapt and readapt, then pass on to the next generations of artists, dreamers, and free thinkers.
I’d like to end with a quote from a song, referenced in this book, that helped me through the darkest period of my life. And since then, has reminded me of how beautiful every second is ever since I made it to dawn.
“A day once dawned, and it was beautiful
A day once dawned from the ground
Then the night she fell
And the air was beautiful
The night she fell all around
So look, see the days
The endless coloured ways
And go play the game that you learned
From the morning”
“From the Morning,” – Nick Drake
You can find Raynarde’s “A Portrait for Tomorrow” on his site:
– Print: A Portrait For Tomorrow (Print) – Thinking Fox
– eBook: A Portrait for Tomorrow (ebook) – Thinking Fox
And their socials at: Raynarde🔜Megaplex 2025 (@raynarde.bsky.social) — Bluesky
Yote In Print
by Ash Lestes