When he began to see the way the world is, not the way the corporate media presented it, not the way his teacher and parents told it, not the way he wished it was, so he wouldn’t have to feel guilt. Once he saw the way the world is, in it’s most gritty, tactile, overwhelming sadness and injustice, well he could never unsee it.

Allow the troubled, complex world to collapse into identifiable points of easily rendered resentment. Cling to a satisfying fire and use it to hold one’s demons at bay.

It’s a strange feeling: to be ashamed and embarrassed of who you used to be. Even with the excuses of youth, inexperience, and influence- her church, her parents, her older brothers, her friends, almost everyone she knew- it still made her deeply uncomfortable to think of herself back then, who she might have hurt without knowing it.

No matter where you went or how novel it seemed when you first pulled into town, it always turned into the same bars, same food, same women, same politics, same liquor, same drugs, same troubles.

Yet his friend was in no way standard. He was freewheeling, mule-stubborn, and cunning as a coyote trickster. He had whole oceans inside of him, the wilds of the country, fierce ghosts, and a couple hundred million stars.

How to explain that we all show up to this party with no invite and no apparent host, and we can depart from it at any moment for no reason?

It was how she made him laugh as a thirteen-year-old. It’s why he dreaded the moment when they’d have to get off the bus at Rainrock Road and part ways – because he knew there was a finite number of those bus rides in this one precious life.

He thought of how cruelty created chain reactions, how one act could set off events, could eat through floors like acid, so to think of all the systematic cruelty in the world was to think of acid burning from one floor of a skyscraper down to the basement.

The house sat at the end of the street, forlorn, the lawn browning, a testament to how the world never works out the way you think it will, let alone the way you want it to.

Thirteen years old, he walked around for weeks thinking of those words, feeling the way you do when you’re outside with your friends and it starts to rain, but you’re too far from home to run for it. So you just get soaked and marvel at why you don’t do such a thing all the time.