Close Quarters

There are but a few things thick like blood, that'll run like such memories. We're one and the same, 'cept for all the ways in which we're different. Now that you've gone and made it a quarter-century, of course, I can't help but think of all the things that came before - the younger years, the yesteryears; the children we were and sometimes are and probably, hopefully forever will be. There's moments I bailed for you, sure, but moments you bailed for me I remember better, like when I myself'd just made a quarter-century and the sky'd fallen on my head, hair out with it. You were still only twenty-one, yet you were one of the buoys that urged me on towards swimming. Taught me how even as you'd only a bit of an idea yourself, all of it selfless, all of it in the name of love and what you deemed right.

You've forever of course been a model of what love is. Selfless and foolish and open-armed, you give yourself up and this is who you are. This is what makes you such a gift, to children and to friends and especially - as I know this gift best - what makes you such an amazing brother. We've forever been trading dreams, I realize as I read your latest - 'least as far as I can tell. My words will be the drivel, the vomited-forth verbs after a night of folly; yours will be the forever, painstakingly second-guessed. But the truths remain the same: we are writers. As she once sagely reminded me, "we are writers, we live in our heads." It's not the phrasing that matters so much as the meaning.

You're dating, and my first thought is to tell you that I found myself on an unintentional date tonight, but there I go forgetting the point again. So, to the point: we're feeling out these spaces,' you write, and by all accounts of the variables I know best, you're as ready as ever I've known you. Or, if I'm honest, far more ready than I. By the same measures: from your accounts, she seems nice. It's in moments like this that I feel the distance most. Separate and parallel lives, yes.

Words, then: there are always words. We've these rusty, rusting digits, the keys we'll paw at and backspace, backspace and still not align quite right. Oz? I never cared much for Dorothy (snotty bitch) or Toto even (puppet dog), but the scarecrow and lion I understand. Brainless and cowardly I understand.

The tin man, and his lacking heart? You and I, I think, are brothers that have never had any such lack. Dive on in, brother! Maybe you'll sink. Maybe you'll swim. Maybe you'll find an island. Call it a crash, even, if you must (see how I pervert your words too?), but damn how I hope you dive on in. Because those words, the words that come with the long fall crash dive - don't think for a moment I don't recognize them - those words? Those words don't need any sort of pronouncing. Those words just happen where they bloom, spiraling out like time or magic or sunrise.

Besides, like you wrote: it's getting better, like everything else. So you wrote, and so it is.

To the next quarter-century!