Footlight Parade, Indiana, Circa Fall 2016

On the back side of the cemetery, you were there in the ground waiting for me.  And if I started to tell this story to anyone else, they would roll their eyes and ask me if I was having some problems with my memory, if I had gotten into the habit of doing things over and over, more than once, and without reason or thought.  Things like recalling you, out there underneath the dirt. And blaming myself for being too far away in the winter.

And then they would write me off, about my fascinations with morbidity and the number of times I had hit my head, excluding the time he crushed my skull with a baseball bat when we were younger.

Is that all I thought of?

That's what they would think.  That's what they would think, even if they didn't say it out loud.  And then they would come looking for me, to tell me how much happier they were when they didn't think about stuff like that, as if they had figured out some kind of fountain of youth. That things were better left unsaid with them, and compartmentalized.

And I felt sorry for them.  Not in a patronizing kind of way.  Just in a way that made me wonder if they couldn't feel any of that, did that mean they felt a muted kind of happiness?  Maybe there was only so much they could take on at either end of the spectrum.  I didn't understand people who didn't treat them both like sidecars, each some kind of condiment to the other.

But if I said any of this out loud, these people would tell me I was chronically dissatisfied.  That I was unfamiliar and untrusting of optimism.  Which was ridiculous, because I asked them what they had against pragmatism and they never had a good answer.  Neither did you and I thought maybe that changed over there in the ground.

So I stood on the asphalt at the front gates, waiting to set foot in there with you and everyone else keeping their appointments with their makers.  And I was going back and forth a bit, like Moonlight Graham.  And I didn't care who didn't get that reference because I felt sorry for those people, too. But knew I if I went in there, I would go back to the wrong kind of bookends, the kind that set me back into sadness.

So I planted myself there at mid-day, like a flagship of nothingness, until some water started dripping from my nose.  A lot of water that I kept wiping away.  Running.  Until I realized it wasn't water.  It was red.  The bad kind.  Dark because there's too much coming out from the wrong places.

But I wasn't ready to call it a day.  Or night.

And there was a gush of wind. Your doing perhaps.  Those gates were shut on me.  I tasted rust in my mouth for a second.  Or maybe I smelled it.  Or maybe it was the smell of the incoming storm.

And just as I heard the Friday morning thunder, I spit out the saliva in my mouth.  I knocked twice on my skull and decided to keep the rest of this in tact.