Dear Jesus. Please help Brian quit heroin for good this time. I look to the crucifix for a sign but Jesus just hangs there. His painted eyes are fixed on Brian, who thrashes, shakes, and grips his sweat-drenched sheet. Amen.

12. “The Only Thing,” by Sufjan Stevens - Do I care if I survive this burying of the dead? Should I tear my eyes out before I see too much? I can’t save you from sorrow.

It's difficult to be close to someone you don’t know. And it’s difficult to know someone who doesn’t reveal who they are and what matters most to them. I didn’t realize as a teenager that understanding my mother would be a lifelong process. Perhaps she didn’t reveal herself because she did not truly know who she was, or perhaps she worried about being rejected. I was never sure.

I can’t find my oxygen at the bottom of a bottle but I can find the peaceful apathy. The kind you find at the bottom of a lake when the panic subsides and you stop trying to swim.

As the emotion grew (and maybe it was simply literary projection), so too grew a fear of love. At an age where kids were meanest to themselves, to admit openly not only that you loved someone, but another boy, carried with it a heavy stigma. What would I do if I ever faced Tommy’s look of disgust? Maybe I shouldn’t tell him. At least not in the seventh grade.

Other dogs lope by, don’t hear barks from my house. I donated unused vet pills. The leash coils in a drawer. My hurt feels like howling.

Those of us in the last chapter of our lives know there are many things we may not get to do. Nonetheless, there is much we can do and, more to the point, do better. The word never implies finality. Never implies impossibility, another word I despise. Never suggests defeat, bordering on despair. It’s an awful word.

But we made sure her flowers were safe that we / Tucked them under our chests til the house harbored / Their limbs that we’d never let the ice pelt them that / Her flowers had tasted the cool rain but no more