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    Dan Kessler playing a guitar
    Basically this

    I don't remember how to be the person who was his friend. Perhaps it isn't my responsibility. Neither of us are those people anymore. Maybe we never were, and I utterly uncharacteristically imposed a narrative on someone doing nothing more than living their life.

    There are people you meet again, and it is as though nothing has changed between you. Dan Kessler is, in my eyes, the same man he was in 2009. I don't know who I am.
    Keep reading... ]]> http://xenex.org/journal/20231220.php 27 Feb 2024 01:00:00 EST

    The Great Disappointment

    Amber before a field of bright grass, taken in Ithaca
    Amber

    It is some minutes before I find Amber at the bottom of the stairs, cradling the kitten and weeping.

    I ask Amber to confirm the obvious: "Are you crying?"

    I barrel down before they can answer.

    They are whole--no blood, no broken limbs. Aside from squirming to escape his obligation to comfort, the kitten seems happy. No pet has died to provoke their despair, but Amber's reaction is not far removed.

    "Cornell. I heard back," Amber says. "They rejected me."

    Forty-Three

    Kristina and Amber, playing with a blind goat
    Kristina, a goat, and Amber (right)

    I arrive home to an older man splayed on our shared porch. I think that Jake, my neighbor, is working on something, such is the contortion of his posture before the door. I realize as quickly that he had collapsed. I run through my first aid training. He is cogent and, though he says he has no strength, doesn't show signs of a stroke. He asks that I help him into his apartment. I don't know how to lift him or how much weight he can put on his legs. I hold him like a parent, encouraging first steps, my hands on his sides, ready to take all his heaviness if he can no longer handle walking.

    Tyler

    The Red Hook Rec Park
    Rec Park

    I did not know Tyler. He cut a distinctive figure, with a mop of curly brown hair and an angular face, an easy smile most photographic subjects lack.

    He was Amber's coworker, though a subordinate. Amber faintly jokes that, before Tyler, the last person to work in the back with them quit shortly after.

    Tyler killed himself. It is the first line of this obituary, so it is not a closely kept secret.

    Circus Tense

    The peaks of a red and blue circus tent
    Circus

    Amber sees a post from a friend or relation of someone with whom they went to circus camp--Amber is the sort of person who, of course, went to circus camp. According to this digital gossip, this camp friends might be performing at a circus within an hour and a half from us.

    I have heard this old friend's name a few times, though I have never become acquainted. How can such certainty matter when the offer boils down to "Hey, Thomm, buy us tickets to the circus?"

    Driver's License

    Traffic through a windshield
    Traffic

    My job requires me to drive over an hour each way on the second day to go to a training about creating a unified English Language Arts curriculum for all state juvenile detention facilities. I hate driving long distances. I find curriculum meetings mostly pointless, often meant for nothing more than to say we did. It is shuffling paper to check a box that will appease a bureaucrat, gaining skills that will never be tested or utilized.

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