50 to 25 / 2014 to 1989 [in progress]

(Minneapolis)

As always. It comes back. It always comes back. At odd times. Strange intervals, the glance of a boy in the college commons, inciting the falling between, the constant limbo of indecision and lack of motivation: the winter storm, travelling across midwestern tundras. The car close to failing more than once. Tires iced over, the accumulation of winter building over us— burying us. Singing aloud with the car’s speakers: oh you got green eyes, oh you got blue eyes, oh you got grey eyes. Caught in a loop of existential loss. No direction. Snow blinding the road. We drove thirty miles per hour on the highway, aiming south. Ever wandering. We both sang loud, shouting into the winter:

And though it hurts me to see you this way
Betrayed by words, I’d never heard, too hard to say.
Up, down, turn around,
Please don’t let me hit the ground.
Tonight I think I’ll walk alone
I’ll find my soul as I go home.•

Bob, you never found your way back home. You were always wandering, a ghost in a blizzard along the highway. The manner you still haunt me. Your past figure influencing the present tense. Perhaps even more so than my brother these days. There were times we whispered together in the alleys between the warehouse bars. Two figures in heavy coats, two ravens hunched over in the wintering. Our dried voices meaningless; our bodies gestured without motioning. (See T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” ).
•25 to 50

Remember to keep your desk by the window. Not as a distraction, but as a confirmation. The fat oaks pulsing. And myself, I exist as a constant reminder in the back of your head. The thin, slumped boy. Misdirected. Isolated.