When I was younger I once said to a newer friend who was seated sidelong on the pavement: the body is connected at the joints, through ringed sockets and upon stringy wire,

so that when I splay my arms for your appraisal I become misshapen, a leaden reverb traveling upward from the tender earth as I rise.

And whether from the posture or the pulpy sound of the crack of bone I cannot find the totality of my strength to stand, I think of the heat of the pavement, the unfettering of those wires no longer taut as I begin to fall.

“When I was younger I thought it humorous to lose my valuables, my schoolbooks and my school supplies. I don't remember so clearly where I had acquired such a habit or where I would have accepted such a notion to begin with, but I think to myself that it must have been on the schoolyard. Ours was a childhood marked by this notion that novelty and a peculiar character was what held you as distinct from the students around you, not intellect or charisma or a spirit of beneficence, but an alluring strangeness that made other people wonder about you and your conditions. Attention, as it was for me and my brother, seemed to stir for us as kids little more than a misplaced sense of contrition about how we came to be the way we were.

And so when I threw my pens and pencaps across the floor when the teacher wasn't looking, or when I left my assigned copy of Judy Blume in my cubby for days and days while telling my teachers that I left it at home, it never lived alone this feeling of mischief that I would abide by without any real sense as to why. I did feel guilty, of course, but that only came after the long-winded scolding from my teachers or parents.

My brother had a more grave sense of personal property even when he was little older and with not much more of a claim to any real possessions. Somewhere in our shared childhood he had learned to hoard, and seemingly as if to flaunt how I had no such compulsion, I would act to purposefully incense him, leaving the video games our mother bought for us both in my desk at school on a Friday so that he wouldn't be able to play them all weekend. Even when he expressed his rancor with his fists, I would continue to do this in the same way that I continued to leave my worksheets in my desk even when I completed them and had only to turn them in for a grade.

On the subject of possessions and the differences in how we treated them, I came to accept the more mundane explanations as fitting. I came to think of them as parallel: my brother's need to acquire and accumulate that ran alongside my own need to find some provocation that could be induced by whatever means, never to wonder to what end they were pursued and what we could even recognize about ourselves in so doing. My brother learned of the world in this finite space that was entirely typical, where my parents fed him ready-made food and instilled in him the value of free time afforded by their sacrifice. And it was as if I would hear these same lessons secondhand and through the prism of his own actualization. If he was as apparently so angry with the people around him for not being as selfish as he was, then it was that I thought it a blessing indeed to have those circumstances of our upbringing to make me so careless in his eyes. I thought it fortunate for us to be made to attend as many community events as we did, not for the people in their spirit of aid and giving but for the complimentary food and drink. Even from a young age I could recognize (albeit not so precisely) that we were raised in relative distance to this idea, how fragile they were the things we acquired, and how much I could abscond with my own sense of who I was by trying so intentionally to discard those things assigned to me.”

After I returned, one of my younger cousins would make routine stops unannounced to check in on me.

Again, it was likely by instruction from my mother. I treated his visits as a basis for understanding how much time had gone by, not just for what he chose to share with me but for what I tried to remember of him before I had left. He was a child at the time, which in our shared family conjures a sort of stodginess in imagining, the deference and the rituals and such. This was certainly true of him as well. But I felt with more frequency that he was not unlike me, some such awareness of just how things came to be and why. How much I weighed in my mind the possibility that he could have just as likely turned down my mother's requests to supervise me. Whenever I opened the door to my apartment to let him in, I felt that there was nothing more palpable than noting how much I could not remember him from before as he slipped past the threshold.

In the beginning, he tiptoed around the subject — who I was with all those years, what I was doing to support myself. I spent a day leaned against the door jamb explaining all of this to him, just as I did with my mother. He listened without much surprise, all the while fidgeting with a matchbook as if to keep his hands occupied.

At one point I paused in speaking for a few seconds to look over at my cat who was in turn looking at my cousin's hands for the matchbook like it was a strange toy. I thought absurdly for a brief second that the young man in front of me was some useful decoy for my family and not actually the baby cousin from my youth.

If you were here I would have spent the rest of my narration bloviating about more of my own imagined scenarios, that I was experiencing some metaphysical defect of the real, that perhaps even the cat was aware of some inside knowledge from even before I brought her with me back to New York.

He must have taken this moment of me looking away as a sign to start talking about himself. He told me of what he was studying, at which university, his friends, a recent trip to Hartford. I asked him like questions, and he seemed to appreciate it the more I listened, him leaning back in the cushioned seat to turn his gaze upward, tending toward some imaginative aspect of his life that I realized was what bound us together.

This morning I did something I realize would appear as strange to an onlooker. I stood outside in the back area of the house and stared into the too-long grass as if something would emerge at any moment. The door was slightly ajar — closed to a degree as to not let the cat out but open enough so that you could still hear the maw of silence from within the house if you were standing beside. It was windy but I felt no chill from where I was.

I thought at first that I had seen a small bear, neck-high to the length of the surrounding grass and shrubbery so that its head would be poking along the tips like another stalk, its nose pointed skyward.

As I stood there, I was aware of several things at once. I was aware firstly that I was listening to any sounds that would escape from within the house. It put me to mind of interminable moments from my childhood, of being back at home and puttering away in the backyard with a shovel and stick before my mother would call me in for dinner through the screen door. There are more instances like this that I recall more for their sensation than any potency to what had happened. (I would think that any such childhood remembered in frivolity would tend toward a feeling of loneliness, but I had no sense of such when I was that age.)

I was aware too of the time of day and how mundane it all seemed that I could trouble myself with such a thing so soon to awakening, as if I had known all along there was nothing in the grass and I only wanted to involve myself in something as to make the morning more substantial.

Finally I was aware of how long it had been since I last stood in silence and was attuned to nothing but my own sense of passing time and breathing. I stood there for the feint of making sure I hadn't seen anything but soon realized I was taking upon it any opportunity to not have to be aware of myself and the day ongoing.

The more I stared into the same spot in the grass, the more I thought I could actually see that bear cub, sunken in the overgrowth, swaying its body to overcome the footing. Ursine clumsiness. I pictured deeply how it would have lurched about before acceding to the wind. I thought of just enough of the sunlight to pour in from above the rain gutters to let me witness it all in such kinetic clarity.

In our old home and when I was still a boy, I would silently lay claim to my sister's room after she had left. My mother said and did nothing as she noticed more that I would read my books there with the door closed, a clock radio beside me on the mattress topper, the memory of my time there so suffused with how little I had wanted of anything else, the company of my school friends, my parent's expectations upon me the closer to the end of another school year it became. I preferred that room not because it was on the ground floor of the house so that the sunlight through the low windows was scant. I preferred it for no reason other than knowing that it was not my room, but without so much a breach as to make my mother and father tell me I was doing something wrong. I honestly could not tell you properly why I started using it as my own.

I kept an old CRT TV hidden beneath the bed frame along with some gaming consoles. I found it in the garage the previous summer, no bigger than 13 inches so that it was quite easy to leave obscured behind several boxes. At night when my parents went to bed I would drag the heavy thing — visible from deep within only by a small green dot — from its too-short cord and place it atop the mattress. I'd play games on my Playstation for hours while forgoing sleep, doors locked, room lights off, volume low.

There is something about the way you remember things that becomes incommunicable, I realize, the older you get. Memories so often morph for me this way, depending on how long it has been, to become in the end as remote, colorless, flat. There comes with that a certain kind of longing.

I find that people tend to recall these periods of their lives with a sense of benumbing, whether by virtue of adolescence, a knowingness of things to come that we cannot brace for as to avoid having lived them altogether. But I prefer to see them, these memories as drawn apart when we view them in our current personhood, as being with a new form, shaped by time, by distance, of knowing indeed what is to come. Of knowing that even a continual and fluvial awareness of the present will soon flatten, and always will, until the end of time.

Less abstractly, I can remember my childhood for what it was. I realized as I got older how much I was chasing a conception of a life I both yearned for and rejected — the quiet aching of an all-apparent loneliness, the comfort of one's own solitude.

I was a diligent enough student without being too much of a stand-out. I would say that you afford yourself a certain social latitude among others in having that kind of disposition about you — quiet, yet punctual. I'd say solely that those kinds of people (as I was at the time) are classed as misunderstood, which to me in some way hints at some indefinite wanting to get to know the person's interior life. Or at least that's how I would have liked to class myself in my collegiate years, if I were to be favorable.

I only realize as I get older how that can be a fortunate thing, to make yourself apparent while also keeping people at a distance, as enough to balk at off-hand social overtures. Only those more attuned would so register. Friendships become few but more meaningful, less enervated from the banality of the more usual things to speak of. Or so the common wisdom would have me believe.

In the margins of my looseleaf, I drew unfamiliar shapes out of restlessness: a cat's face, spirals, irregular geometric shapes, names of people I didn't know. I was hardly awake enough to remember anything of the lecture, but I passed my classes without much issue. I talked to some other students but they were much like me. My father would have called that sort of thing an example of “soft power.” I had no inkling to want to do more than I already was. It would be much the same after I left.

“There's another reason for it, I'm sure. There always is.”

"I wasn't afraid of her if that's what you're implying."

“Very well could have been but you said it before I could. God, you're prickly tonight. Have another beer.”

"There was this one friend I grew up with who described her all the time as 'hard-nosed' and I had no idea what the fuck that even meant until I got older."

“Weird-ass thing to focus on.”

"It wasn't literal."

“I'm aware of that.”

"It's like when you're trying to describe the way someone comes across to other people."

“Like I said, I'm aware of that. And I wasn't talking about that friend.”

"Yeah, but I mean... I think I was always a little worried about her hearing herself described that way. Always took things at face value. No room for being too flowery."

“I'm actually realizing a lot right now.”

"About what she was like?"

“No.”

"There was that one celebration we had a year before I left -- I think you were there -- where she was dancing with my father and everyone made this big appeal to their authority by pulling into a large circle around them and staying quiet and I was just standing off to the side with my cousin. And I could sense even from him how bizarre it all felt, this sudden formation of onlookers. Like you can tell from how subdued my mother is that she's aware of all the people looking. My father had the same way about him but, you know, he's a guy. It was different with her. Like you can almost see her wanting to look back at everybody. There's almost an expectation there if it wouldn't have felt so improper."

“You're confusing me with someone else.”

"Next thing I remember is we're outside and waiting for the valet and there's a moment when I'm keeping my cousin company as he's smoking apart from everyone else and the brights of the car beside us light up. And my mom is just standing there in front of the car, not looking away because of how bright it is, not telling the valet to turn it down for her sake. There was something about that moment when I caught her expression for a half-second in the unaware darkness. I wonder if I maybe heap a little too much of myself in how I examine her. As much as we were separate, I still wanted there to be some mutual understanding, you know?"

“So are you going to answer my question? You spent all night bouncing back and forth between resentments and regrets that I'm sure you have a clearer idea of it now.”

"I didn't say anything about having any regrets. I only brought it up because I think about it often. I was always trying."

I have always believed that to write about another person is by essence to make them more interesting. To pare things down by presuming about them this focal momentum as required in a narrative. The filmic nature of one's perspective. You forfeit so much in mundane detail in an effort to attain the sublime.

My father was a person to never wonder about his own character. In his absence, I find that this was the way about him on how he comported himself that made it so difficult for me to understand him. He became for me a mental bulwark in this regard, I guess. I think often about the interior life of my sister, for instance. Or my cousin. Even with my mother as of late I can sense a futile kind of thoughtfulness behind her demands. But it becomes a different sort of thought experiment when I try as much with my father. Even as he has passed with years between us, it all starts with how I remember his face, the way he said plainly how he felt and his expression remained inflexible. I could never once sense an affinity for him outside of what he spoke of: his work and family.

So often too I find myself in dialogue with my father, in my mind and during idle moments. Conversations never to transpire and not just for his passing but for the expansiveness I afforded him in my daydreams.

I imagine myself asking him many things. I imagine asking him about a brooch he once bought as a gift for my aunt, of what looked like a flowering aster. She wore it to the service, in fact. I imagine myself seated side-by-side. I imagine asking him what it means to live a good life, and how to be a good person. He would respond in my wanderings that it would be through the consistent effort of good deeds. He would tell me that you become a good person by practicing at it.

I once wrote in secret a novel about clay pots across a span of prehistory and where I could imagine the people who made them, a void stature and cold upon a nearby hillock, to become enfolded in time, lesson by lesson by lesson, until we are inured of context.

I once wrote a collection of poems about a teacher I loved in my youth. He blessed me with a strata of doubt, wherein the point was to subvert but never once. Each poem a dialogue between the two, me, an invented authority albeit nurturing, about my own unwillingness to say yes to anything. Even a child understands the malleability of clay.

I had an idea for a story. It would be centered on a single character and his life, but each chapter would be told from the perspective of another person, a close friend in childhood, a work associate in his older years. An obligatory chapter with a passing love. Momentary bits of revelation as each is premised on how little we know about the man's inner life. A few misunderstandings to create some levity.

The passages I've already envisioned and that come to mind as easily involve the people more immediate to him — a sister, a classmate at his prep school, a drinking buddy from work. I noticed his demeanor. He preferred to ask a lot of questions. He had an affinity for drink. Every week he'd made a habit of... These are the kinds of relationships I categorize as having some significance with regard to a cultural touchstone — even if I'd never had a “drinking buddy” of my own, I had seen enough movies or read enough books to carve out a certain articulation.

I've given it some thought and I think the more interesting and maybe even subversive exercise would be writing in the voice of someone heretofore unknown to the man in such a way, a barista at his favorite coffeeshop, a client he sees every few months at a yearly convention. People interacted with so sparsely and in so particular an output. To be wrested from any kind of expectation because the focus is both so specific, as the reader would base their reading experience on the interplay between how much information they have already gathered of the man, and how much new information they are learning is to be taken at face value given how constrained the setting, and so grandiose because I would in a way be allowed to write almost anything.

I look back so often on the period of time when I first met some of the people who would persist in my life. There's a sort of old wisdom among academics that I hear so often that says that there's a latent power relation in feeling the need to think about and address how others see you, in any stage of a relationship, whether as strangers or lovers.

But it's always been more interesting for me to see myself through the eyes of another person. Especially whenever I think of all the things as possible to come to pass between us.