My friend asked me who I fell in love with. I think my first sustained love was within a friendship, towards a boy who lived down the street from me. We went to school together. His name was Nick. He looked like Elvis might have looked as a kid. Shock of hair. Vitality. Built natural in the chest. Roughneck youth. Rebel. Undisputed non-chalance. We used to spend lots of time playing video games and wrestling and outdoors in the snow in the winter, just playing until we were exhausted. I loved everything about him. And his family, too. They cared for me like I was their own. Very down to earth. Lots of laughter in the house. Lots of silliness. Dad was a crazy professor type. English teacher. When Nick transferred schools (he was getting into trouble academically speaking), we lost track of one another. Forever. I looked him up recently. I finally found him after many attempts of search by name. He is an artisan in Portland, Oregon and has won awards for his ceramics. He has a wife and i don't know but maybe kids. I did not contact him. I thought about it. The past is so angelic with us. Why not let it be? Just nice to know where he is, and that he is living a good life up north of here, about a ten hour drive. See? Part of me wants to make that journey back home. Part of us all the time, the urge to reconnect the dots. The moments of our lives. Find out if it all really happened, or was it a dream? And still... life as recounted by memory, is more and more a dream for me. I love life! I do! How it dissolves slowly on a really cold winter day, like a snowflake. Passes into the crux of the Four Winds. Dissolves into the Great Truth. The Divine Ground of Being.
