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Nothing he said was cool. I mean, that's nothing new, but it's important now, looking back.

He lived in a family that lived to arrange things. If they could have forced a cat to move where and when they wanted it to, they would have bought a cat.

He spent most of the day wishing he could make other people's dreams come true by making his dreams come true. His first poem was about sex. The next one thousand ones would be about mirrors. That's not true, but that's how it felt.

He can't remember what his first book was about. At least not right now. He can't remember how he got here, except that his best friend had to push him up the wheelchair access ramp at school like a boulder. That's not true, either, but that's how it felt.

Sixteen the night before made him walk funny. Now he's in a stall, snooting the remainder.

Somewhere in all of this his consciousness caves like bedding. His friends all become a light or nothing. They move away slowly. He wakes up with the same principal who used to talk shit about his hair holding his hand. She's soft. His mom is crying, crying. He wakes up again with a charcoal moustache.

There's a tiny moment where he realizes that this is his life. He has been moving in and out of hospitals for three weeks, sitting in traffic, punching himself in the leg, breaking his glasses on purpose. Something comes up in him. It's not cinematic or whatever, there's no lights, swelling orchestra, retrospective overdub.

There's just me, a room and a big feeling.

He comes out the other side with the same girlfriend, sleepy. No more ceremonies. He just meets up nightly via a greasy fragment of her weave, pinned lopsided to his small head.

Just me, us and the remainder, lit up like the rim of a galaxy.