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October 17 - December 27, 2019
“No mom, you don’t. I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.”
He looked so happy and I wondered about that, his capacity for happiness. Where did that come from? Did I have that kind of happiness inside me? Was I just afraid of it?
I liked watching them, all three of them around my truck. I wanted time to stop because everything seemed so simple, Dante and Legs falling in love with each other, Dante’s mom and dad remembering something about their youth as they examined my truck, and me, the proud owner. I had something of value—even if it was just a truck that brought out a sweet nostalgia in people. It was as if my eyes were a camera and I was photographing the moment, knowing that I would keep that photograph forever.
“Yeah, it is. The funny thing is, I sometimes think my mother loves my father more than he loves her. Does that make sense?” “Yeah, I guess so. Maybe. Is love a contest?” “What does that mean?” “Maybe everyone loves differently. Maybe that’s all that matters.” “You do realize you’re talking, don’t you? I mean you’re really talking.” “I talk, Dante. Don’t be a shit.” “Sometimes you talk. Other times you just, I don’t know, you just avoid.” “I’m doing the best I can.”
“We’ll play that game,” I said. “That game you made up to beat the hell out of your tennis shoes.” “It was fun, wasn’t it?” The way he said that. Like he knew we would never play that game again. We were too old now. We’d lost something and we both knew it.
“Everything makes me think of him. Sometimes, when I’m driving along in my pickup, I think of him and I wonder if he liked trucks and I wonder what he’s like and I wish I knew him and—I don’t know—I just can’t let it go. I mean, it’s not as if I ever really knew him. So why does it matter so much?” “If it matters, then it matters.”
Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer morning could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.
Everyone was always becoming someone else.
This was what was wrong with me. All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been so close and yet I had always fought them without even knowing it. From the minute I’d met Dante, I had fallen in love with him. I just didn’t let myself know it, think it, feel it. My father was right. And it was true what my mother said. We all fight our own private wars.
