A blank space where a title should be

Even before coming back here to live I had written of the anarchist, of how he and another friend took me on the tour of where industry used to be and the fall of Oldsmobile. When I had first come back the few excursions I went on, breaks from my father’s deteriorating mental and physical breaks, he took me on. He … passed away on Wednesday. I haven’t any words or none for his family. I had sort of fallen out of touch though he lived just up the street. No particular reason, I just did.

There was a note on the memorial site that frightened me a bit and put things into perspective. The note read how this woman had moved into the neighborhood in 2006 and he had be welcoming and supportive of her. 2006. 2006. I’ve had to adjust my own way of saying how long I have been here, from a couple of years to seven come September.

Time slips here, one day dovetails into another or the day just like the one or the other. I thought there would be time, hell it had been thirty-five years in between moving out to Oregon and moving back and seeing him. That he was here for thirteen years is … frightening. We had talked about our other lives in other places. And, no. There isn’t time and so I feel casually cruel, or crueler than I had intended and in a casual way, and shit, that should have stung even if he were alive.

I feel like I should mourn time or how time works here in the lowlands, the wastelands, the frozen swamp. My other friend was closer to the anarchist, had grown up with him (catholic school). That friend had stayed here, his whole life, here. Time must have really fuck him. I think there’s one too many miles between him and I, though I was closer to him, there’s a rift of divorces, absence and unspoken things. I wouldn’t even mention it, but … time must have really fucked him.

I’d be less freaked out if I could cry or rend my hair (it’s not from fear of showing weakness, I’m alone in the attic, haunting my own time, a bat in my own belfry) it’s that … my grief is more self-serving at the moment. I do grief in unalterable ways and so it takes a while. At the moment it’s the weight of time. Sort of wished I hadn’t started to collect watches, they let you carry time with you. Shit.

I guess I don’t need a protective pseudonym for him anymore. Louis, louis Hillman, died peacefully in his sleep.