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Azriel

Jeff

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About Me

summer, 2008. skateboarding in a park,

camera in hands, shaking, filming brendan as he tries to ollie. you, in the infancy of your

hopes and dreams when the world was still a path open, limits unknowable.

tomorrow, maybe you would film gabe jumping in the pool from the roof,

or maybe you would film brendan finally landing the kickflip, or maybe in the later afternoon

as that summer-sun set low in the sky and the endless day slowly plodded towards the inevitable setting of the sun

you would walk down to the beach with your friends and hear the waves lap up and make fun of the

swarms of tourists in speedos and try to race home before your parents noticed you were late for dinner, and after dinner gabe could come over and play DND.

Maybe you could cannonball into the pool, the sticky hot humidity still permeating through the early darkness, and let the chlorine set into your shaggy brown hair and maybe your dad would come out and

yell at you for being too loud and maybe you would say goodbye to gabe and maybe you would go to sleep, no idea that the

time, every second, marched towards the pinpoint, a date carved into the near future where life diverged from you and your skin would be ripped open by a knife and

when the blood would spill in the hallway between your room and the dining room, in the place you felt safest a terrible secret only time would know, but you would not know that death was etched so

close to you and you were not far at all,

but would that knowledge have changed the endless summer afternoon? Would time have slowed and stopped and merged into panic as the heat pounded on the tarred driveway and the dry sticks of the grass poked

in your shirtless back and the song of cicadas sang loud and foretelling? No, there was no panic. Only a 13 year old boy with his friends, in summer, living.

And you could not know until he killed you, that your murder was so unfair, so horribly absolute, violence fell upon you, the weight of blade

slicing bodies tearing skin and spilling blood, and I guess it is better that did not know that the last moment was the truly the last moment until

the life finally drained from you.

Time cursed you, sure, but knowledge did not. Not in the dying. But in the emptiness that was left behind; every path suddenly rendered useless, every potential suddenly gone,

limits suddenly narrowed to a single sentence; “Josh is dead.”

No room to make mistakes, no room to grow-up, no place in this trajectory for you to be anything at all except a memory, and when that well runs dry, where will you go?

I will keep the torch lit through every watch. I will remain your sentry.

And now I walk this cursed place, searching for you always.

Every bump at night, every pattern noticed is a sign of your presence.

I am not the one who is dead, but I commune with you as I write this, as I type these words I ask ‘where are you? do you need help?“

and you say in a dream that you are not at peace and that you are still a slave to time, stuck behind closed doors, and all of the paths and branches that were decapitated with your death.

And we stick to each other like a curse. I itch with the memories of you alive, my soul gnaws at where you have gone, and I pound with terror when

I come to face with anything resembling the way you died.

Your spirit is made alive with anger at what you will never be, and as I commune I feel that anger, that

righteous hatred of violence, that righteous thrashing against the injustice of your death and I take it and it metastasizes the itch into a hunger and transforms the hunger into an untouchable pain, so deep that I could never reach it, a bruise at the core of myself that festers and becomes infected.

And now that we see each other, now that we know what is not and never will be, now that we can share ourselves, can we walk towards some peace? Can we move from the burning potential, the wasteland

of your death and move towards a future unbruised and full?

Dead brother, will you walk with me into the fire and emerge cleansed?

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