But we were far from whole, each bearing his own fracture for surviving narcissistic parents and each sputtering and steaming at the need to be of this world. Both of us were addicts; internally addicted to the Absolute Nature of Things, and externally addicted to whatever could soothe our pain at living in the world. For Robert it was drinking. He is recovering. For me it was making. I am a make-aholic. He was driven to drink to flee a relentless sense of never measuring up, while I was driven to make and achieve to alleviate the oppressive nothingness of not being loved. But these are common maladies, which is why I bother to address them.

This year, after the initial swelling, the bud on the bonsai seemed to stall and stay that way for weeks . . .

In the 1400s, Kabir said:

If you can’t cross over alive,

how can you cross when you’re dead?

We came to this. At first by dark inches and then by cataclysmic leaps. We spent many evenings seeking the smallest gateway to the Supra-Mundane, running wildly in the night, using anything to pry the ordinary open.

There were many thrilling moments, including the warm spring afternoon he introduced me to the poetry of Pablo Neruda. We were sitting on a grassy hill at the edge of the university when he began to read the rhythms of a voice I’d never heard but always known. I took the book, which he had borrowed, and wouldn’t let it go for over a year. In those days, we gathered in the name of poetry, not yet ready to throw away the costume of art and simply be in God, though Robert was always closer to simply being than me.

But always at the end of our triumphs, in the glow of our pirated moments of the Infinite, he would trudge up his driveway in the dark as I dropped him off, wait till I was out of sight, and slink back out to the nearest bar. Likewise, I would simmer my way home and sit in the dark at my desk, as my wife slept, trying to capture where we’d been, scribbling furiously, making, making, making, as if the words could keep the threshold open a bit longer.

Once out of each other’s sight, we were drinking and making. He would twist lit butts in tablecloths and want to eat lightning. I would pound coffee and write all night long. These were the most desperate times because we had no idea that we were desperate.

This year, the bonsai’s one bud began to push against its stalled skin in late May. I misted it daily, and it quietly soaked up what little water landed on its taut skin, and very slowly, very minutely, it began to stretch . . .