Inch Off My Nose.

I hope I'm not wasting this. Late summer sun streaming through the window every vein illuminated every wrinkle, we usually age well, I thought, in spite of the vices. Our vices. My vice. I hedge my bets against a bonfire and a 4 AM bedtime. I drink water and take vitamins. The way we justify things.

We were talking about the old days and it's so impossible to fully put yourself back there. I remember though, I remember! Roasted sweet potatoes and onions and those chicken snacks and a bottle of red before it was done. It's weird that it existed and also that it doesn't still and how things can be so perfect but also so temporary. We will be eighty, probably, and both remember those days but never speak of them. Sometimes you outgrow things for no other reason than that the plot has to progress. You take what you can get -- a hot afternoon made cool by the water, a turtle with no pressing engagements or charges, a silent supplication that this could always be so. A momentary promise to let go of the rage that prevents it.

A small scar that I pick at sometimes, a rushing effulgence at the exsanguination. Evergreen, that place out in the woods, Kevin and his band (not that Kevin), Jon, Euclidus, that night in the stairwell and the art walk, how I couldn't protect you nor did you need it, Elliot, Rugby, Nick, everything, everything. Tuna. That there's not enough whiskey to decide if that dream means he's trying to comfort me or I'm trying to comfort myself. That's the beautiful part, though, right? That you don't know. That you're just stuck here, trying to squeeze out as much beauty and meaning as you can until the answer is laid plain in front of you. And to hope that when you get there you weren't too far off. Or lonely.