Here I Am

“And then, wherever you choose to go next, you will always be home.”

But I loved them. I loved the truth they conveyed: that kids aren’t yet able to fake it. Or they aren’t yet able to conceal their disingenuousness. They’re wonderful smilers, the best; but they’re the very worst fake smilers. The inability to fake a smile defines childhood.

“Come home not only because your home needs you, but because you need your home.

Because they were young. Because one is young only once in a life lived only once. Because recklessness is the only fist to throw at nothingness. How much aliveness can one bear?

He kept reading: “In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don’t seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other’s pain, and being present for it.”

“And what is everyone facing?” Jacob asked.
Shlomo said, “Himself.”

“Kisses. I just remembered what Sam used to call kisses.”
“What?”
“He had a few different names for them, depending on the situation. A ‘make-it-better’ was a kiss given in response to an injury. A ‘sheyna boychick’ was a kiss from his great-grandfather. A ‘that-face’ was from his grandmother. A ‘you’ was one of those spontaneous, I-need-to-kiss-you-right-now kisses. I guess we’d always say ‘You’ when going in for one of those.”

If you don’t have a device, try your brain.

There, on the dirt, in the middle of the simulated savannah, in the middle of the nation’s capital, he felt something so irrepressible and true that it would either save or ruin his life.
Three years later he would touch his tongue to the tongue of a girl for whom he so happily would have cut off his arms, if only she had let him. And the following year an air bag would tear his cornea and save his life. Two years after that he would gaze with amazement at a mouth around his penis. And later that year he would say to his father what for years he had been saying about him. He would smoke a bushel of pot, watch his knee bend the wrong way during a stupid touch-football game, be inexplicably moved to tears in a foreign city by a painting of a woman and her baby, touch a hibernating brown bear and an endangered pangolin, spend a week waiting for a test result, pray silently for his wife’s life as she screamed as new life came out of her body — many moments when life felt big, precious. But they made up such an utterly small portion of his time on earth: Five minutes a year? What did it sum to? A day? At most? A day of feeling alive in four decades of life?

“I’m drunk on my new sobriety.”