The Infallible Truth

Time is the leather whip cracking back or is it a cylinder, like the kind you ran in and it spun around with you, or is it like that imaginary friend I rode bikes with down 6th Street as a child.

I can still feel every memory as if it were real. I can still feel Richard as if he were too. Other times, I can’t feel him now or then at all. Some days he talks to me. Ya like a fucking narrator. I wonder if it’s him really, or has his voice just assimilated into one of my personalities.

In the beginning it was anger, and downright hatred for everyone else. Then that turned to guilt because we hadn’t talked in too long, because he didn’t have my current number, because I didn’t tell him I got engaged. Then the guilt became truth that I chose this and he chose this, and neither can feel guilt or question the past and the journey.

I used to always want to be alone, and now I hate it. I hear him or me too much. Narrating. Or answering. Shhhhh. This is weird. I want to talk to him about what’s going on. I can’t accept that I will never have 2 hour long existential phone calls with him again.

I better accept it though, because the infallible truth is He is gone. He isn’t here. I can’t call him on the phone. I can’t drive to Texas and find him. It’s all fucking wrong. Most night he is in my dreams, conversations and situations I can’t remember. Yet, this one dream was awful. In it, Travis had died instead. It was terrible. Richard was wrecked. He kept telling me to Fuck off. So I drove to East side Grand Prairie, his mom pointed, and he was there laying on his parents old 70’s couch. He was unemployed,overweight and his hair had grown out into a blonde mini afro. He told me to fuck off.

I woke up to John saying my name and asking if I was ok. I was crying in my sleep. It must have gone on a while because my face was swollen and my eyes were too. So I’m trying to read this book that turned up in the month following his death. It was uncanny. I picked it up from the counter, finding it odd and stowed it away in my bag.

The Beginners Guide for the Recently Deceased by David Straume odd ya I know. So, in this book which 7 months later I have started. It speaks of whatever people held onto and thought about all the time in life, would be in death as well. Which got me thinking…. Perhaps he can’t move on from me, if I do not let go. Perhaps the dream that was so vivid and all I remember him saying to me is Fuck off means I must let go. If not for me, for him, my dear Mickey.