Those Who Can

You open the mailbox and find an invitation to a college graduation or a wedding. Some burly biker dude sends you a Facebook friend request and a message assuring you that you changed his life a quarter of a century ago. Some loquacious girl who tried your patience for an entire semester writes you a note on the bottom of her final exam declaring you to be the best teacher ever...OMG.  You tear up and tell yourself that you made the right life choice, but your memories can’t always agree.

You recall that chunky, silly, little boy who could never make his subjects and verbs agree, how he always charitably chuckled at your teacher/dad jokes. You wish he hadn’t forgotten his Albuterol in that pick-up game, or that the paramedics had been just a few minutes faster, or maybe if traffic had been a little lighter.  You wish his mama didn’t have to tell you thanks for coming, everyone in the church looking at you, wondering who you were, the only pale face in the crowd.

You wish you hadn’t saved that letter of recommendation for 24 years, the Word file you avoid almost every day, the one you never got to send. You wish he had taken a different route, or maybe if he had driven a little slower. You wish you hadn’t lied to his mama, her crying on your shoulder in that intensive care unit when you assured her that he was gonna make it. You wish you hadn’t lied in his eulogy when you assured his classmates that you knew he was in a better place.

You examine that graduation photo every morning, the dark green robe, the valedictorian’s chords, your arm around the smartest student you ever taught, the one who could ace Advanced Placement exams for classes she never attended.  You wish she hadn’t used a shotgun, so at least you could have looked at her face one last time, another psychic landscape catastrophe.

You struggle to understand how an 18-year-old boy could write songs like an aged and seasoned poet, tunes you still hear in your head a decade later. You wonder how he could be making us all breathlessly cackle on a Thursday afternoon, and then be breathless and cold in a coffin on Sunday morning, a heart valve older than his muse. You wish you could strum an A minor chord without breaking down.

You wish you had known, and you can’t forgive yourself for not knowing, that he, the most perfect human specimen you have ever known, didn’t drop by that morning just to say thanks and wish you a Merry Christmas. You now maintain that he wanted to finally reveal the secret that you had already inferred, long before he could admit it to himself.  Just once, just fucking once, you wish you would have made an exception to your long-standing personal ethical proscription and pressed him for the truth you felt he should evince at his own pace. Maybe then he wouldn’t have felt the need to use his daddy’s pistol to save us all from the shame he couldn’t bear alone.

You now realize that you really only strive to believe in God because you need these shortened lives to go on, somewhere, anywhere. You admit that you can’t possibly write the fourteen more paragraphs it would take to complete this lamentation, fourteen more souls in a yearbook you carry with you always. You look at the faces in that yearbook and long for an invitation, a facebook message, or a note on the bottom of a final exam.

Alan Caldwell is a veteran teacher and a new author. He has recently been published in Southern Gothic Creations, Level: Deepsouth, Backwoodsman Magazine, and oc87 Recovery Diaries (forthcoming).