tonight it comes, buddy. for you, as it came for me. no need to be scared. i will be there when it does, though i cannot stay much longer after that. it's hard to explain the circumstances and means by which i am even here. i assure you they are quite novel. yours will be short and painless, a moment sleeping. mine was a ruptured aneurysm, more painful, though quick and merciful in its way. at least in the grand scheme of things, and when you're dead, and can finally step back to see your life for what it was, that's what remains: the grand, immeasurable, vast scheme of things.

i am both here and not here. you can think of me as a composite, little more than fractal memories and shards of feeling you've forgotten. i'm the dust bunny beneath the couch, the ones we used to get in our first apartment. do you remember the trees along schreiber avenue in the summertime? how from our third floor windows, it felt like we were in a tree house. how the branches swayed in the winds. how the sun rose above the nearby apartment buildings. i am that slow accumulation of memory, the hair, skin, and dirt residue of your life. something built up but kept largely out of sight. i am nothing substantial. i am what remains.

we always knew this is how it would go. it came first for your nonnie, then for your mother. the same classic range of symptoms: forgetfulness, disorientation, moodiness, a loss of motivation. it was destiny, we always knew that. still, to be honest, i thought we had more time. more time to prepare, to marinate in our memories, to reinforce the barricades with nights out on the porch pouring over old photo albums. but i was taken too soon, and you were left too long without your buddy. for this i am sorry. looking back on the things we do is what makes the pain of their being gone bearable somehow. it is our greatest pleasure wrapped around our greatest pain.

the letting go, the hardest thing for you to do in life was the letting go. you never let go of anything. when i met you at twenty-three, you were still wearing clothes you bought in middle school, and you kept most of those even until you were thirty. and everywhere we went, you collected coasters and movie ticket stubs and maps and receipts, stashing away the little detritus of your life until you could process it, like a scanner, through your memory. you memorialized every passing moment with a photo, a still life, some effort to capture what you felt so profoundly to be moving beneath your feet. you recorded every scrap of feeling in your journal, drew little pictures of the characters and images that ground themselves into your mind. you badgered every friend until they called you back and never took no for an answer. it was in the full context of your life, the thing i loved most about you. you raged against the dying of the light as no one i ever knew. nothing would slip away from you, nothing would be lost.

your nieces and nephews still come and visit every once in awhile, though you're slowly unsure of who they are. they pull your photo albums off your shelves and sit there and look at them with you. they point out the pictures of you and me in the tetons, in the cascades, in the himalayas. you like the two young men in the pictures. their smiles make you feel home somehow. lord, you took hundreds, thousands of photos. you were the vivian maeir of your time. you painted life in pictures. your nieces and nephews are kind and gracious to come, and they sometimes bring your brother to visit. your sister can no longer travel, though she misses you. she would like me to tell you that she thinks of you often and can feel you breathing sometimes when it's late at night all the while from valdosta.

the world out there continues on its steep decline. you're not missing much, i suppose, tucked away in here. the country we knew and grew up with is gone now. elections are irrelevant. the two parties are in disarray. across the political spectrum, the public has become increasingly intolerant of independent powers within the government. and there is a broad-based failure among the intellectual classes to attract and suffer independent political minds. we start to buckle under ecological strains and geo-political instability. as states world over move to neuter and manage their increasingly agitated populations, they pull out of international agreements and cooperative frameworks and the cycle accelerates. war seems inevitable. all is lost.

still, life is suffering, and no one ever told us otherwise. there is nothing more natural, nothing more inevitable. yours is a suffering of recognition, first a failure to account for yourself, who you were, where you went, what you did, how we somehow survived together. then there's the failure to recall who we were even in our private spaces. as the number of people who knew me dwindles and falls away, ariadne's thread is severed and it becomes harder and harder to find my way back to you. finally, there is the failure to recognize even yourself, so that it's the continuity you lose and you become suddenly just another old face out there in the world, somehow always old and never young.

how to make you see that it's all still there, that it lives because it lived even once. at this point, it's the struggle to retain it all that hurts you, for it was always an impossible feat, even in the best of circumstances and most desirable of conditions. our lives become what they were always going to be. there was nothing we could have done otherwise, and when the hour strikes, we too will fade into the winds.

just know that your life is bigger and more expansive than anything you could possible know. for every memory you remember and for every memory you forget, there are two things you will never know: like how i watched you sleeping the night we slept atop desolation peak, your face squnched up inside your sleeping bag, or how i reached out for your hand while crossing the puente de toledo in madrid but you did not notice, how how beautiful you looked the night we spent drinking lagers in capetown. i say this only to signal to you how much larger our lives are than anything we could retain.

and so now it's time. it's late. the night nurse is sitting at the desk. the red moon is full. i remember all the times you would drive down to the lakefront to see the moon. i remember the joy you felt, and i hold that here for you. all you need to know is that there's nothing to be afraid of here. all you need to remember is that i loved you. no, there is no great reunion. no, there is no life to come. what we had, we had. and we must let it go.