one last song

It's been so long since I've written anything real. Tonight I will try. Tonight, I'll tell you I got a package from my aunt, who sent me a book that belonged to her best friend who just died and she sent it to me because it's about wandering and always trying to find some concept of yourself that always seems slightly elusive and because she said I'd understand and all I could do was sit on the couch with a beer and cry and cry and shoulders shaking think, has it really been seven years since my closest childhood friend died? Has it really been that long since we walked along Lancaster Avenue, sneaking late late at night, when the fireflies would sleep on your shoulder, into the park where we grew up playing softball, where we drank warm, skunked beer in high school, where we spoke of all the porches we would visit as adults. We promised each other we'd be 90-years-old and happy and drinking spiked lemonade on a porch overlooking some unmarred horizon and I keep thinking of things to tell her and after all these years I wonder when it is that time is supposed to make everything alright. Sometimes, everything seems so small and I want to be so quiet and it's hard to explain this to a beautiful city that never sleeps. Its windows are like fireflies tonight, dancing on tonight's horizon by the bridge, silently moving above a landscape full of old blood and newly mixed cement and spilled Thai food and mouths dribbling tequila and ripped flannel and you and me and everything in between. It is almost midnight and despite the little clothing I have on I can't stop sweating and it is nights like these I wish so much you were here. We could walk, slowly, down the street, stopping beneath a street lamp so we could see each other and say, oh, hey, I miss you. I hope so badly you are somewhere bicycling through naked rain, always.