Bronson Gao

July 26 20XX

Mishawaka

TV SKY

Her yearbook photo was on the screen, pasted over shots of the police tape for thirty seconds. The TV is always on. They found a body blown into the ground. The decision was made. The 4-H fair was more exciting. The world turned on its side and forgot.

I just sat there. My parents looked at me, said something observantly sympathetic.

I say general, expected words. I think I sounded fine enough, which I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be fine. They exit though, and I just sit.

I remembered those times when we over-shared with each other, and that first dinner at the mall, and when she went to my party, or seeing her at CVS. I never even got to know her that well.

I remembered “Skull Sugar.” I remembered, hardly. I remembered we were going to the same Ivy Tech. I looked forward to it too, man. I fuckin’ looked forward to it too.

This is how I want it to seem. I can’t assemble real despair because it isn’t mine on this couch. WSBT 22 dissolves into a series of insurance and pharmaceutical commercials. This utility is a false salvation, graciously coercing codependency. It needs you like a friend needs a friend: not for the friendship, but for the ego. And if it works, it might make you feel like a dead brother with cocaine on his lip, a hickey on his neck.

I got in the car. My mom smoked a cigarette in the garage and just watched. I felt like she understood, and I think there was love for twenty seconds, the same as before middle school. This bond was contorted in what ways as always. Now was holographic, even if it wasn’t itself and couldn’t be.

It was familiar and could not be held. If I sit there and stare at it, it will look like thirty apathetic seconds on the TV screen, and the pathetic portrayal of guilt in what isn’t a mirror, but not a wall. I wanted to feel sorry, I bet.

The sky is glowing white, brushing against the edges of the leaves. The summer is about over. Whatever parts that have stood still will become absolute looking forward. And it will be in ending, disintegrating into the memory of long walks at fourteen, my first iPod, and Khinsider contextualized by skies the color of pale fire. Adolescent boredom lives long enough to know what things you won’t really become, and what’s inside of the adults in the room. And that makes me wonder how it dies.

No more lucidity, no more fluency, I tune to a static signal and immerse myself in a familiar, flavorless sky. This is the part. This is my metal machine music at the end of a world, where the whimsy peels off like dead skin from a steam burn. I’m over it.

I go to the skatepark, the same one I was at when my parents called. I precipitated the quiver in my mother’s voice.

“What’s up?”

There was a breath and a moment of hesitation, a sigh. Her voice trailed off into a croak, and she gave up quickly, sobbing dead at the receiver.

“What happened?”

It got worse from there, and I stayed on the line the way back home. For that half an hour I loved her too, but not the same way I did since before middle school. So sitting here now, I realize the sensation I felt in my mom’s cigarette wasn’t what I left behind in eighth grade. It was that flash of necessity to a body the night I learned Chan died.

I sit here without a skateboard, posing like a trailer-park burnout. Watching cars pass, I take in the enormity of a place like this. It is the only one I need to maintain, and that’s the only job I can’t quit. I’d put in my two weeks, and as relief fades, the last thing I can do is my laundry, the dishes, and clean the house with a broken leg.

I die slowly through a lifetime, I must be. I’m just waiting for something better than busting my face on concrete or punching a skinhead. I sit here reckoning with the fact that this is all I have, Deadra.