he died ten years ago and on the anniversary, i didn’t bother to blink. i was making a sandwich, maybe, or perhaps noodling around with yet another shitty story when the thought crossed my mind. and there, confronted with the most familiar of ghosts, i realized i hadn’t thought about him in so long, that the depression his departure, among other things, conjured up three years ago was, in fact, over and since then, i took the position of the healed. with outstretched palm, i said to myself, “i have been restored” and with that, all traces of his outline left each frame of my memory, a stalking afterthought or ever-present nuisance, akin to God in an atheist’s life.
this, i’m sad to say, is not my attempt to backtrack, to double-back to two weeks ago and unearth sorrowful musings about a boy burned. it is, on the contrary, the irony of repair: normalcy reclaims its reign, sutures wounds closed and, with the pain dissipated, the scar goes unnoticed. you remember how you used to remember: meta-distance, a spiral strut from the center to the edge, the space between you and Heaven—me and him.
it was as though i begged the sun to truncate the overcast and, when complete, i realized he straddled the clouds, a silver surfer atop mercurial smoke, and i lowered my head like, “well damn, i didn’t want you to go, too.”
and you wonder, wonder, how long it’ll be before pearl harbor and 9/11 fade into that gentle, forgetful ether, when the last coot collapses, in mid-salute, and takes with him the last telling of a myth, cocooned in time, transformed from actual fact told centuries, millennia, eons, a few minutes ago. i don’t blame the milieu of televised ennui or a headphoned culture; truth is truth and, should you see me on the plane, train or time machine, word to john, my iPod will be by my side, but i digress. i blame no one and no thing.
i don’t mean to seem like i’m proselytizing for your words and trues, rights and that’s-what’s-ups. it’s just that…i miss missing my friend and i don’t know what to call that. when he crossed my mind, we failed to give each other dap because, naturally, we were always corny as fuck. there were no words, no tears or squinting of eyes like, “i know i know that face, but…”
the recognition was silent and absolute, like former friends crossing paths with a headnod, a show of “all is peace” amid an amicable divergence. maybe that’s what it is. we were friends, and yet…however…the matter of the fact is…he is the embodiment of a cosmic kaleidoscope, while i’m still chained to flesh and prone to occasional, humanistic bouts of schizophrenia; he’s seen the inside of the sun, or watched a star tumble into itself, then reemerge exploded and reanimated into a new planet…meanwhile, i’m trying to stop the coolant from leaking out of my car. we just can’t see eye to eye, but all is peace. such is life.
