I step gingerly through woods newly clothed in snow. The world is now devoid of color. We do not walk together. We do not often walk together. You are always ahead. I trample the imprints your shoe has pushed into the powder in boots a size too big. 

Some things that I remember

I remember rolling decades old matchbox cars down lengths of decades old orange, plastic track across a decades old living room under the watchful gaze of a decades old grandmother who had watched my father do the same. Wind could be heard blowing down the chimney. The cat's bell clattering as it turned a corner.

I remember peering over the top edge of a lawn chair and the sudden and panicked fear that I felt as I unexpectedly tipped over the edge and dropped onto the rocks below. I have forgotten the pain.

I remember the barn behind my aunt's house encircled with blackberry bushes. 

I remember being thrown over Austin Weaver's shoulder during an altercation. Was it cold outside? I walked away in tears.

I remember one brother throwing the other over the bed and the way the window shattered when his foot flew through it.

I remember riding my bicycle home in the cold, wishing I had stayed right where I was.

I remember a thunderstorm summoned.

I remember the scars stretched across skin.

I remember hiding under the rear seat of my parent's Peugeot.

I remember being afraid of darkness. 

I remember building gasoline bombs in my neighbor's garage. 

I remember four of us in my basement, asleep and content.

I remember the pain that took my breath away. Feelings of loss and betrayal. 

I remember a darkened basement and pedaling in circles, and children laughing.

Circa April 7th, 2005

You are easily the most enjoyable aspect of my life.

Circa October 5th, 2006

The other day I doodled my gravestone onto a page. The epitaph read:

"There's nothing wrong with anything."

Testimony

I lie to myself and, as a result, I lie to others. The truth is that I am heartbroken. That this feeling hasn't changed in the slightest in the past however many months. That admitting this to myself causes me to feel a hopelessness that I haven't ever felt before. That what I lost I will never get back. I am overwhelmed with regret. I am nothing more than a familiar face, and I can't decide if that's enough. 

18

Nowhere to go

Nothing to do

But sit in this room

And think about you

Now

Fortune had smiled on us once, her face a radiant glow that warmed our naked limbs. But fate has plunged a knife, jagged and cold, deep into our chests and we now lay bleeding out on the floors of prisons of our own design, the dim light of day fading farther beyond horizons we will never reach, turning slowly to a night that will last forever. 

Hold close these fleeting, final images of beauty and freedom glimpsed through the rusted bars. Ignorance and fear form the foundations on which our respective cells are built. Trapped by inevitability; there is no escape, only surrender. Only darkness. Only solitude. Only death. 

Unless...