The Culmination Of A Long Day's Journey - 1. Chapter 1

It was at the culmination of a long day's journey when I heard your name for the first time since I'd escaped the desert town in whose dreary streets we had played as boys and where I had just returned. Had it been 20 years already? 30? I'm not sure. Nor can I remember exactly where we met or by whose hand we had obtained the beer that first night, when we got my Bug stuck in the sand along the canal road; or even how we got back to your house afterwards. But I do remember how you were laughing so hard that you couldn't finish your sentences and how I was horrified when you told your mother everything we'd done that night; and the way she scolded us and shook her head in dramatic resignation before she winked, pulled out the blankets and told us to shut the hell up and go to sleep.

"You know Vince?" my brother said after I had interrupted his conversation to inquire if he was talking about you. "Yeah, sure" I replied, but then realized that I couldn't have known you; that in all this time you had moved on to become someone else; that you had grown and built a life and a family and dug roots deep into the sun-baked earth of this place in which I would have not survived. Birds of my feather rarely landed here by design and never stayed once the obstacle to our flight relented. I had so long sought to be among my own that I'd flown without hesitation.

I cannot even remember saying goodbye.

"We used to hang out," is how I explained my curiosity. I left it at that. It would do. My brother nodded his head to show he understood and went back to his conversation with the friend to whom he had just introduced me, and whose name I had already discarded. I am pretty sure that he was father to one of the boys on the soccer team whose game I had traveled so far to attend.

By the time the game was over and I saw my nephew racing towards us, face flush with triumph and the innocent presumption that youth would never abandon him, the weight of the words I'd overheard had already formed a silent space in me. Nothing outside that space seemed to move or hold any meaning.

If I could have just once said, "Hey man! How have you been?" Or "What the fuck you been up to, dude?" and pounded a masculine slap on your back for emphasis, that would have sustained me, guarded me against the sting of that unwelcome revelation. I am sure I could have donned a convincingly stoic expression in front of your wife and family, your friends or whoever might have been present to keep us from speaking candidly; to keep me from asking what was really in my heart. But I can't do that now.

"How'd it happen?" I asked my brother after dinner. He responded by beating a fist against his chest. "Ticker."

"But he was only... only..." I realized I wasn't sure.

My brother grunted an acknowledgement and popped open a beer. "Yup. Runs in the family, I guess. His Mom went the same way. She was young too."

"Yeah. Drag." I replied and quickly changed the subject, pretending to be absorbed the details of my little brother's marital tribulations as my thoughts ran over the dark trails of my memory.

Poems sparked to life and died as quickly in the vacuum of that silent space inside me. They are forgotten now, left to wither without the attention they needed to survive. It's just as well. Even in infancy they were odious odes, brooding and self-pitying, insufficient to express the extent of my unspoken mourning.

But I feel no inadequacy in being unable to express, in words, the beauty of your smile, of your spirit, your charity and the memory of your friendship. They cannot be so easily contained.

Goodbye, Vincent. Finally.