in august my father lost his job. cut backs within the company and such. he hid it from me for quiet some time, the sadness of my dog dying and the realization that a week or so before i discovered the girl i loved no longer loved me. he deemed it too hard for a young man to bare, i had only just unpacked. they were considering selling the house, and he had put the motorcycles on the market by the time i found out. that night i climbed to the top of my old community center alone (the very same place where i gathered courage for first dances and kisses and such) and watched the glass beer bottles break one by one between the riverbank's tree trunks. i made some cold calculations about whatever events made that girls heart beat faster and drank away the days that filled in the summers gaps. i was so fucking angry that she wasn't there for me at that moment, and the enormity of my lifespan that would now take place without her loomed in the darkness (as did her ghost in my linens). my family's stress was an unwanted reminder of heartache which, at the time, seemed as real and painful as a gunshot wound to the chest. but a bearable numbness about those months and their events has grown and remains and its strange how things can change (and change again). perhaps for the better.
