...
I missed him by two days... and forty-six years... it was forty-six years ago he shot further into my heart than I knew my heart went in. He spread through my cells and into that cosmos I'd only remembered when I was three, with that Einstein book on the sidewalk... that little moment to myself where I opened up this "misplaced" item to the exact page where they gave the meanings of the letters and numbers and symbols and I'd worked out that there was as much cosmos inside me as outside me.
That even wasn't strictly right but it was perfect it turns out.
There isn't any inside or outside to me.
But the sight and sound of John Trudell was the trigger for coming to know the extent of that. Most people only kind of get a real hint about this when they are making love. This is big trouble. You already know I'm right about that.
It's a wonderful thing and it is an evil thing, both, as powerful in its ability to deceive as it is in its ability to save each of us from pure waste from birth to death. So this is why I was so terrified of telling him how much I loved him once it became feasible to reach him via this deuced system of pipes.
He'd've known precisely when I ran up and hugged him forty+ years ago, but our graduation day trip to Alcatraz was obviated two days before it got to happen. I keep wanting to say it was the day before, but others are yelling that it was two. I guess it doesn't matter more than 24 hours, but that was going to be our big declaration of who we were and where our hearts were, taking McDevitt's yacht to Alcatraz right after throwing off our caps and gowns.
The feds threw our heroes off Alcatraz first. It ruined our day.
By then I was already getting the hint about how the world could slap my cosmos around, but wasn't as easily crushed when it got this nasty. Still, since I can remember, and that's almost every minute since I was born, I have been terrified of uncommunicated messages. Missed phone calls. Letters lost in the mail. Computers crashing in the middle of perfect communication.
There was a tv special back in the fifties where they told the stories of the things that happened to people all because of letters never received. My mother just thought I was being silly to cry so hard. She didn't know I'd known all about this already... about the truth not getting to its intended recipient.
I never got the truth to John Trudell. I was too afraid. He never was. And now I have to do it. I don't want to live with me if I don't do it.
always and any time....
