Rivers and Roads, rivers till I reach you.

He died. I knew it was coming. I found out yesterday. It was in a cordial email that said that the services would be in three different places and if I couldn't make it I should find a way to remember and celebrate him. It happened 22nd of October, in the early morning. While I was complaining. After a two hour flight from New York and then a three hour bus ride from Chicago, I arrived in South Bend. It was three in the morning. I decided to walk home. There wasn't any particular reason. It wasn't a lovely night. It was just another night with no self inscribed meaning. My eyes still ached from the transition between the confines of the bus to the stadium lighting at the university. I couldn't see a single person in the parking lot, only the distant intrusion of drunken cackles. The cans crunched under my boots as I trudged along greeted by the sour stink of beer, vomit, and urine. Rolls of paper towels flapped in the wind like grounded kites, and the few ice chests that were left behind hung open like broken jaws before the row of porta-johns that lined the road along the perimeter of the campus. 

I'd like to think that I was forced to stay up to see him off. The way people sometimes pop into your head before you get a phone call from them. Maybe death works the same way. Although I didn't think about him, he didn't pop into my head. I knew he was dying. He's been in pain since the day we met. Dying since the day we met. His absence is a tragedy, but his death was a relief.

I wonder if someone was there to say bye? Did someone hold his hand? Did he finally hear the words he spent his entire life saying to someone else? It's going to be alright.

I've seen hundreds of dead people. They get to be objects. Things that we clean. Things that we describe. Natural causes. An arrest. A bleed. Liver failure. A fulminant. Things that we put in the ground. I never saw the absent gaze of a person I knew.  My cousin committed suicide when I was a kid, but I never got to look at him. I remember seeing him when we went to the ranch. He was my age, but much more serious.  Nobody ever talks about him. He killed himself in the height of adolescence. Grave adolescence, before life could give its punchline.

I watch the people in the Park in Queens. Couples walking with light smiles. Gestures I perceive as laughter. I envy others because the the happiness I project onto them is always an impossible one. I know we all suffer. I know that all happy people are unhappy in their own way, but as I get older I find that logic is just a stupid craving that we get when we're beyond the problem. We can look back at the idiocies of ourselves and others with a smug grin and try to make sense out of things all the stupid things that either make no sense, or make too much sense. Birth and death, of relationships, of jobs, of ourselves.

I only spoke to him once, from the time he started hospice to the time he died. I called a few times before, but there was no answer. As I called, I remembered listening to the ringing and growing anxious because the words leaked out of me as I waited for him to answer. The sentences, the words, the jokes all gone. Sometimes I was glad he didn't answer. Glad I didn't sound like a fool, when I'd ask, "How's it going? or how are you feeling?" When I finally did get through, he answered my call with his eternal patience and listened as I talked about myself. I always do. I'm not good at asking. I don't know how to ask questions. Questions, from my own mouth, always sound alien to me.

I rambled for the first ten minutes of the conversation, afraid that my voice would fall out of my mouth and break into a thousand pieces on the floor. I can't remember the way he looks. I have a picture of him, but the one in my head is already fading. His voice is clear. The last words, "I'm tired, Jorge."