I now make monthly payments on this clunky, comfortable house (circa 1900); I own that dull Ford wagon (circa 1990) parked out back. Without quite trying, by default, I am hiding here. I am not quite safe, but I’m not dead, either.

This, you see, is my life’s A.D./B.C., revolution. I, Richard Hartley Mims jr., am briefly returned to my home state, to bovine health, to my own care-taking. So nice you’re here; you, alive, too. What a coincidence. That gives us something undeserved in common. I need to testify. The tale of them should ride one long gasp across this first morning I feel fully off-duty. I need to tell our history quick.

I want it stated in a way as literal as those guides so popular at our public libraries.

How to Tile Your Own Patio in Under Six Hours, No Previous Experience Required!

I want it rendered into mild, safe steps.

How to Survive the Loss of Your Beloved Address Book in Under Fifteen Years, How Not to Numb Every Inch of Your Interior While Doing So, What to Make of Their Remains, and How to Go On, Having Forfeited Your Pals and So Much of Your Previous Experience! First Time Every Time.

The relief today feels like this: having borne all the children you could ever want, you finally choose to get your tubes tied. No further worry about preventing other babies, ever. The perilous fertility has ceased.

My own artistic generation, gay and not—so essentially and goofily good—idealists for just as long as we could be, longer—is now, before age fifty, often good and dead.

There is one big advantage to getting left back:

Now I know I am alive. Turns out, that is a huge plus. It makes you concentrate. Suspecting you’re fairly strong, you let cabbies rise, godlike, to your own occasion. Your duties as a nurse force you to half-medically forgive yourself.

There’s another main joy in being the representative left behind: I am allowed, encouraged, to remember them. You will not believe these people I got to love for years. I still do!

I have always been so lucky in my friends.
Just tell me I am not the jinx that “disappeared” them.

A week and a half ago, right after the exit of my best surviving pal, one of the Titanic’s final survivors died. She had been just five when the liner sank. Last words her father spoke to her from deck?—“Hold Mummy’s hand very tight. Now go and be a good girl.”

She recalled everything. Considering the darkness, certain noises stayed especially real. After the hulk’s immense last gasp, from one cold lifeboat where she drifted bundled with her mother in her mother’s coat, the child heard many swimmers scream. Such cries.