The place we send our prayers

I guess I could sense in a way that it was the last time I would walk out of your house like that, Nina Simone just BLARING in the truck's radio I loves you, Porgy, and especially that second line, don't let 'em take me, that beautiful desperate sad quiet and solitary deep deep loneliest leaving. Like how lions can just sense which gazelle is the weakest. GOD, I hope to never be there again. Those hostas that I planted and the cord for your laptop that we ordered with my credit card and the dogs so happy to see me and the sad bag of dog food I brought, all the time knowing. God damn, the road to my regret. But you know what? I don't think I'd change anything. I went to pick up the pizza at 8:30 and I had this suspicion that you and whoever you were with had driven past the house a few times and were waiting just for my truck to be gone and when I got to Romeo's there was this most amazing beautiful rainbow that spanned the entire sky, 180. And I went to take a picture of it, to show it to you, and as I framed it within my viewfinder it suddenly hit me that there are some things you just can't share. That you simply have to be there to experience. All the blizzards at dairy queen and sitting on the truck's tailgate and the sunsets at the lake and how your camera equipment was always far more important than anything else, despite everyone else around us content in each other's arms and how you never ONCE passed the door lock test. Here is a hint for your next one, when she lets you into her vehicle since you can't drive FOR GODS SAKES open her door if it's locked, unless you truly are the world's most selfish person. And I think that perhaps you are. You never cared about John Coltrane but I always cared about Rancid. And not til you. Sunday afternoon drinking beer in your mom's store looking at pictures of your lives past and you telling about all those girls and after twenty minutes spent thusly you realize and look at me and say "I've known some pretty interesting people and I am standing here with one of them right now" and how you really didn't know anything about me then and the words fell flat, so why in the hell did I continue? What the fuck.

It's going to take me such a huge amount of time to heal from this. God damn, your voice sounded so small and so final in the phone when you said "yes" to my so it's just over then and the breakdown you had to hear on the other end and your just well I'm going now, onto the next thing. Flash of light, now I'm here now I'm gone. Can it really work that way? And that there will never be a way to say anything final, in any real sense. Just that goddamn nina on my speaker, but I loves you Porgy, why can't you get that. Don't let em take me. A week ago to this night we held each other and tomorrow you told me to have dale's keep my old bike tires so you could use them, what the fuck, seriously, one week? A thousand million horrible silent crushing hurricanes. And what comes next is not you and me. It's you. And me. And never the twain shall meet. Do you, do you, do you. Do you have any idea what it was like to walk out of that house sewer smell for the basement hostas that I planted dogs even looking at me through window pane like knowing it would be for the last time. Cannot even wrap my head around the concept.

Vomit.

I have never been as low as I am right now. Just remember this, for Gods sake. How it's almost like a dream. How it comes up and hits you, knocks the wind right out of you. And that you really think that you'll wake up any second now and boom, it's all over. And the phone clicks and the last six years are gone, just like that. And in between the sobbing shaking stabbing nothingness it's your voice you hear yelling at Johnny Friendly, "I coulda been a contender, I coulda been..." silence marks frame your desperation because there is absolutely black hole nothingness to fill the void.I will find strength in pain. I will change my ways. I'll know my name as it's called again. Where else can you go, but up? There is strength in that.

The heart is gone so what else is there to fall back on? You're smart enough to figure your way back to sane after this, at least. What I've learned is that amid all of the crazy hard sad painful moonless nights, the joyful and the drunken happy dancing nights and the rest of it, all the rest of it, is life. In those little staccato blip strung together moments. And so I take my gift. And try to go live. Get on with it.

Ryan.

That thing like some great hunger-sadness, when it takes over there is no retreat in the mind from it, I can scarcely imagine a time when the body wasn't consumed with this great seeking longing downgoing, it was all my fault to set myself up this way. Sometimes I think maybe because there was no clean break I will forever be trying to create one. To understand. This control mechanism, this absolute need to make all of this happen on my own terms. And the sinking feeling when it's over and the person is just humoring you at that point and how you can feel that, how you know a returned phone call is nowhere near as important to them as it is to you, how you're not even within the same universe. That nearly immobile sadness that makes you want to go in everywhere, and as soon as you get there you want to leave, you can't be alone but you can't stand to be around anyone. I should have learned before, about the crucible, about the heartbreak, about how it is simply not possible to relate to/understand some people. Some of them are just crazies and you will never get into that head. Fully. Sunglasses on a Friday evening watching television disconnected a million miles away.

It happened this time like ten thousand thunderous sad quiet beautiful hurricanes.

Olympia -- that was four years ago, idiot argument in the room they got us, stuck in that place and the hollowest hollow you have ever known in all your life, like actually really being alone, 26 years old and this is the first time ever. Not knowing that razor sadness could run so deep all the way to the core. I went to priest point park on final rites and there is some layer of crust over my heart that developed there that I have never quite yet fully excoriated. And the whole thing was over me drinking too much beer at dinner and falling asleep early, sleep sleep always the damn issue of sleep and to this day I am self conscious about going to bed early. Two and a half years later at your parent's breakfast table my father stood there with me and you signed the papers sunglasses saturday morning and you did not even utter one word or look up, we left and you were off to fuck some girl in freemont who probably stayed up all night with you.

And scabs you pick at take forever to heal. Like trying to replay the choose your own adventure novel til you get to the ending that doesn't make you feel like all of it was for nothing. It is the innocence I would cast off, the naivete. I wish I had been born the son of a female shark.