And at 10:00 on a Wednesday night, in the middle of a crowded bar, your beloved friend tells you off-handedly that he's moving a million miles away in eight weeks. He says "I thought I told you." But doesn't he realize? If you had known, there would have been more urgency in your hug tonight -- your eyes would have burned more intensely. He tells you this and turns away, steps up onto the stage, picks up his guitar sympathetically and smiles with lips of gratitude to you for being so understanding.
Your feet and fingers go numb, and suddenly you're crying in that 10:00 Wednesday night bar, and suddenly the coke you’re drinking tastes like tin on the roof of your mouth, and suddenly you're walking ankle deep in wet leaves through the Somerville night. Choking on autumn air and walking because you don't know what else to do. You sit down in a parking lot, in the dark, across from the sad playground with the squeaky horse on a metal spring; the sound makes you feel alone. The tears slip to your collar bone and you can't imagine the hole that will be left when he is gone.
He says, "I thought I told you."
You say such clumsy things -- about playing up North sometimes, about going to New Orleans once a year and isn't that so close to Texas, or Africa… you say it automatically, not believing for a second it offers any consolation, but saying it because it's easier than enduring the silence that says, "It's going to be a long, long time before I see you again."
And he doesn't understand how he's changed you. You think about the colors he chose to paint your world with -- the night he set down his phone and tilted it up so you could hear him sing, playing one of his songs on the ukulele, slightly digitized over your cell phone connection.
How you set the alarm an hour earlier so you could sit in the filth of the subway station listening to your favorite song, sit one foot underneath you, smiling at 6:00 AM. How that made going to work okay. How seeing his daily commitment made you want to get up at 6:00 in the morning to show dedication to your own art.
How he earnestly and unwaveringly supported your writing. How he made you laugh when you didn't want to. How important these regular Wednesday nights have been to you. The ones before this absent-minded revelation.
And you were the last to know. And that stings a bit, too.
So you walk home, to the little park by your little house where you pace when you've got something to pace about. Then you sit red-eyed in your blue bed with your purple laptop propped on your knees -- writing because you don't know what else to do; writing because that is what you do.
And writing.
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