After all going into Ryden’s room together, taking turns having a moment with him, we started to migrate back to the common room. But I lingered by the doorway. Autonomous bae noticed this, could tell that I wanted to go back in for some one-on-one, without the pressure of others in the room. She told me to go back in. We asked and Ryden’s dad said I could.

Getting real close by his bedside. I could hear his breathing. Catheter out his neck. Hair on half of his head shorter than the rest, where they’d buzzed it to operate. Eyes open a slit. Propped up slightly on the inclined bed.

I reiterated what I’d said last I’d visited, the only other time I had. On his birthday, day before mine. That this was just a deep hibernation. That I’d been in a deep hibernation, too. We were those deep winter babies. Just burrowing. Spring would come. We’d re-emerge, together.

Only spring had come. Ryden hadn’t emerged.

I stalled out in my spiel, registering this. My voice cracking then stopping.

The seasons just kept going.

We only had so many seasons.

I thought about what Ryden’s dad had said. Shifted my approach. This wasn’t the time for symbolism. Ryden was dealing with something structural. Something neural. His situation didn’t fit into my symbolic structure. Wouldn’t, no matter how hard I tried to make it.

“Remember that day you saw me trolling around by that Rite Aid on Market bro? When you were headed to work? When I was headed home? You knew exactly what I was on, all that I was feeling, I felt. Your look felt so kind bc you didn’t pity me. I needed that shit.

“And those couches. Those fkn couches. How impossible it seemed it’d be to get em all the way up those stairs. But how we had no choice but to. We’d lugged em all that way. And then we fkn got em up, bro. One step, one turn at a time. Each next angle its own thing, its own puzzle. And how good it felt to sit on em once we did. How dank eating those banh mis sitting on em was, bc how hard it had been getting em up.”

3

FLOWER BOY

June 2019

The cherry blossoms had shed then swirled around some then gotten stomped on repeatedly and were no longer cherry blossom–colored but brownish.

Still pretty though.

Roomie bae and I were walking up 42nd, away from Market, past the football fields there. Back, from the pool. She lookin pretty in a flower-patterned something or other.

Dress thing.

Not skipping, but felt like it, how she was walking.

Rocking my old Soylent dad hat I lent her then gave her once she kept wearing it like I’d given it to rather than lent her.

Bill curved low like a trucker.