Our formative years will always speak to us.

Free but you should bring some dough for booze and books!

There are far too many pro-life folks celebrating in the misery of their fellow humans this week. Hardly a surprise.

I believe we should take every step to accommodate those who have hindering disabilities. That is not to say we should carry the paraplegic up every flight of stairs because they don’t like wheelchairs.

And there’s the biggest difference between us, Michelle. There’s the difference that should have kept us from maybe ever even becoming friends to begin with. Hope doesn’t mean anything. Hope is what people have or do when they can’t have or do anything else. Hope is inaction. It’s sitting back and just waiting for what you want to come. It’s hoping for everything to work out. It’s what we have when we feel we have nothing else. I don’t ever want to hope. I want to have. I want to try. And I’m okay if I fail. Hope won’t get anyone a goddamn thing. It never has, and it never will.”

A year had passed since Chuck died. I had quit Tigris and put my dusty PhD to good use as an adjunct professor at Nevada State University where I taught uninterested twenty-somethings the finer points of Beowulf and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The schedule allowed me to work on my novel, and the pay was enough that any freelancing I did was out of choice, rather than need. My nights were void of death-metal concerts, replaced by bath time with my boys.

We spend our lives surrounding ourselves with the right people and the right job and right amount of shit to call our own. Life is a puzzle. We gather the pieces and put each one in place, and when we can finally make out the picture, we’re complete. But then a piece is taken away or lost. People die. Friends become strangers, lovers lie. At best, we can still make out the picture, but it’s clear something is missing. And those pieces can never be replaced.

Mark decided to move to New York, which meant Lou was down his best friend in Chicago and had to find his own apartment. Mark came with him on the final walk-through. It was a two-bedroom just a few blocks away from where they had been living. Lou liked the neighborhood, and the rent was right where he needed it to be. It wasn’t the flashiest apartment—the walls bulged out in certain spots, the kitchen floor sloped ever so slightly, the rooms were small, and although Michelle would have thought it was a total shithole, it was just what Lou needed.

It wasn’t that Lou was hung up on Michelle, it was that the past three years of his life had been so focused around her. She was central to everything, and it was all he had to talk about. Talking about anything before The Age of Michelle seemed entirely out of context. That’s the hardest part about breakups: finding a new definition of yourself. Since the breakup, Lou had continued sinking in a sea of whiskey and cigarette smoke while searching for that new definition among the fragments of the past three years. He didn’t talk about Michelle because he missed her; he talked about her because he didn’t know how not to.

Brother, do not blame yourself for Chuck’s death. He was on a course to destruction. If it hadn’t been your house, it would have been someone else’s or the highway or by a policeman’s bullet.

If anything, it’s my fault.