Memorial

by Bryan Washington

I didn’t ask Eiju what made him so amiable with his patrons or what those motherfuckers had that his family didn’t.

No one gets to choose what steadies them.

You shouldn’t make a home out of other people.

We all change. We’ll all have plenty of homes

in this life. It’s when you don’t that there’s an issue. That’s settling.

We all live our own lives.

That loving a person means letting them change when they need to. And letting them go when they need to. And that doesn’t make them

any less of a home. Just maybe not one for you. Or only for a season or two. But that doesn’t diminish the love. It just changes forms.

There’s this phenomenon that you’ll get sometimes—but not too often, if you’re lucky—where someone you think you know says something about your gayness that you weren’t expecting at all. Ben called it a tiny earthquake. I don’t think he was wrong. You’re destabilized, is the point.

much just depends on where the quake originates, the fault lines.

we take our memories wherever we go, and what’s left are the ones that stick around, and that’s how we make a life.

he kisses it, because it’s the kiss you give something you know you won’t be seeing again, something you’ve been conflicted about for decades, your whole fucking life,

One thing happened, and then another thing happened. We didn’t think about whether it would work or not. We just did it.