Lately it occurs to me.
Bobby died the other day. It happens every day, somebody cashing in the deposit on a used container that they don’t need anymore. In the moment I hear that someone has gone, I flash through my memories of them: the joy and the grief, the poison and the poetry, all the way back to my earliest memories: how did we meet? And where? Remembering the feeling when the strange became the familiar in one bewildering moment of recognition.

Lately it occurs to me.
There were others there and then who are not here and now, ones who taught me and others who took from me; ones who pointed down and promising path and others who jumped off burning bridges; ones who were almost gone when we met and others who are just starting out, who look at me and see a lost boy limping toward oblivion.

Lately it occurs to me.
Bob won’t be creating anymore on any plane that I can access. But what he did, he did well enough, and in just the right way, so that it will still be creating new pathways in curious minds 300 years from now.