it will and it will not be pretty

these lines came to me this morning before teaching. this is usually how it is when i write---i get a felt sense of something, something not yet named being called forth. what i didn't know at the time was that a close high school friend had passed--heart attack at age 33. this i found out tonight around dinner time. i had spent so much time hanging out with him and our group of friends and then life happened and many of us moved away and lost touch. occasionally we'd write or visit, but those times got fewer and farther between.

my last trip home i was in the mall where he worked but i never went into sears...i had a fleeting thought to stop in, but i didn't. my phone is full of unreturned texts that say let's go pens or how bout them steelers from him. i laughed when i got them thinking how meaningless and wasn't sure what to respond to. Now I wish I had texted GOAL or something like that. Anything that would have made him smile back.

He used to drive me around and we'd watch movies on his water bed and week after week I turned down his advances to make out. But week after week he'd still try and not be a total jackass after I refused yet again. He took me to plays and high school dances. His car was aqua and he wore too much cologne. He had pictures of naked women in his room and would put on the lava lamp when I came over. He always made me laugh. At his high school graduation, I drank pink wine from a box with the girls from his school who I thought were snobby. The wine made them less so or me a little less judgmental. It was summer and I want to remember it like that. Laughing on the back deck watching badminton or volleyball. And thinking anything was possible, that the girls I didn't like, I could like, that in the sunlight with a buzz, I thought maybe then I would kiss him.

tonight I cried for the community I had, the one I have, what I want to hold on to and what I have let go of and what has been returned. I cried for love in all her forms, all the ways in which the heart opens closes and opens.