The pain in my chest mercifully ebbs, though I can’t tell if that’s because my heart has given up. I’m afraid to listen and feel for it. With my right hand clutching my chest, holding it together, I mount my feet, shuffle across the garage’s back wall, and enter Eddie’s house. I follow the trail that has been left. The trip to Eddie’s bedroom is a journey across the desert of me and it takes decades, all my previous decades, to traverse. I see everything I’ve done and been and forgotten. If I was never quite happy and if I didn’t know who I was and if I was never able to identify the formless yearning for something unattainable, there’s solace in who I am not and there’s solace in my continuously and infinitely halving the distance toward a bittersweet, wondrously, longingly inexplicable truth. Gabba gabba hey, right?

Damn right!

When I finally arrive at Eddie’s bedroom, I might be too late. The bedroom is dark and fuzzy, which might be a me-and-my-shrinking-corona-of-vision problem. My chest is full of shrapnel. I sway and limp to his bedside on feet that are fully numbed. I am winding down, but I still have a few ticks left. I bet. Eddie’s aging face is graying and wrinkled. So is mine. I don’t need a mirror to know that. I don’t like seeing the part of me curled atop Eddie’s chest and, sorry, I will not tell you who or what I see. I’m keeping that for me too. I say, “I could stand here until I can’t stand anymore and watch you shrivel up, you fucker.” I wearily climb onto the bed that’s as soft as a marsh and I crawl onto Eddie’s chest and part of me tantrums and howls and beats its mighty fists against me as I reclaim it. No one likes a whiner, right? Eddie’s face has gone a splotchy, puffy purplish red. A hiss splits his lips when I shift my weight. I say, “You will be visited by three other spirits,” just to fuck with him a little more. I roll off Eddie’s chest and bed. He coughs and retches and gasps for air. Whole but still split in a way I’ll have to learn to live with, I mosey out of the bedroom a hero or antihero to no one, myself included, and that’s okay by me. By the time I get to the garage, Eddie stops coughing and switches to shouting out hysterical threats and entreaties to God-sanctioned vengeance. As if. But before I’m smote, I hustle out the garage’s side door, into the floodlit yard, across the grass, and over the fence (not very gracefully) to the beach. And I don’t hear Eddie anymore. There’s only the wind and waves.

Fucking mosey. You crack me up.