ebbing.

It’s tough to think back on the days when Bryan and I were best friends, just because everything looks a million times better in light of the fallout. Somehow, memory has a way of discarding the imperfections, offering up instead an inordinately pristine slideshow of sensory overload, five-second clips with too-bright lights and amplified laughter.

We’re at Bryan’s uncle’s lake house in '05, sitting on the gray wooden dock, fishing lines drifting as aimlessly as typical mid-afternoon conversation between fourteen-year-olds. Bryan turns to me and asks me if I know how to play Wonderwall on guitar yet, which is his way of keeping me accountable because I'd promised to teach him once I learned.

The air hangs thick and almost wetter than the seaweed swaying in the ripples beneath our toes, and the sky is the kind of blank paper gray that means there's literally a storm on the horizon. I say something clever. Bryan half-smiles, the way that always meant he was amused and trying not to show it.

Then we're back to the present, the approaching thunder echoing into the cavernous emptiness of a fading reminiscence.

spectator.

whatsername's not guilty,
thought she was a lock.
angry people congregate again.

who just won? i think he
was a guest on 30 Rock?
love that show, I might have seen him then.

whoa, they found and shot him
and they've got it on TV.
gory stuff! how crazy! is that live?

wow, they've hit the bottom.
screw these rising fees.
how do they expect me to survive?

they've released a new one?
i just got the old!
why's this always happening to me?

can't wait for this season!
that guy could be gold,
guess i'll tune in every week to see.

tradition.

The world is a great and a beautiful thing,
held together in one sense
by a thousand invisible forces --
magic that finds expression
in the symbols of language
passed down from generations
to indicate and illuminate the intangible,
made comprehensible through the
streamlined care of human intellect
tasking itself to know.

itinerary.

Between the nightmares on the nightly news
and the raging war within my oft-divided heart,
my world is fraught with hard-fought hills
with sharp-ridged boulders,
and ocean depths where treading begs to break.