Let me try to remember all I can... First, what endures... The cold, the sunlight, summer dying... My breath in clouds, the hollow whine of the school bus. Waiting at the stop... Was it on 6th and D? The pretty black girl that waited with me; she lived in the house at the stop, pale blue with tall laurel hedges... I think this was before Alek's mother moved into the house on 7th...

And after he lived on 5th, there was the blonde girl, all curves and suspicious china doll face, who drove a belching orange Bug... I would hope for her most mornings when I rode with Alek in his Microbus, no matter how many dismissive looks she gave me... And I was always searching for some mode, some stance that would unlock everything else... That would reveal the pattern, a path that would close the loop... No more forks, no more doubt. Yet all of this thinking, all of this posing, never amounted to anything.

And there were the maples that grew across the street from my house on 6th, old and rotten. I picked up their seeds and let them whirl down from the concrete porch. The trees and the grass exalted the rough edges, the laziness, the clumsiness, the perversity, the waste, the neglect in me, in the house, in the neighborhood... They were the only things I never cursed then. I began to write "because they in their living permanence stood outside the manufactured rectangles and squares..." But it was not their permanence, but their deathlessness, their tale of renewal, that defeated all my ignorant pessimism. The dripping gashed hulk in winter became a blazing crown of yellow-green in spring, this tree that began as a weed, a nuisance. It stretched its limbs, filled all the space, cared nothing for the wants or needs of the people walking, driving, yelling underneath it...

It always made me lonely and bored when I had to climb into the musty sweetness of the school bus and turn my back on them. Then I thought it was me, folding at my weak points, showing my inadequacy. But I think the sadness really started when I sat down on the squeaking green vinyl and saw them through the frame of grimy glass and aluminum rivets. Some days the mood would darken to a low ceiling as the bus geared down and and became all whistling brakes and shouting outside the sweeping breezeway at the front doors of the school. And all the trees and leaves were replaced by roman brick and aluminum transom windows. And of course all of these people, half-formed, with their thing, their shit, their needs... Not to mention my own shit, decidedly not pulled together, no, very much all over the place like dirty laundry on a bedroom floor... Secret and tied-down as I thought I was... There's no avoiding the Judgement, you can only change the way you face it...