How we all wanted it to come in our sleep, if we had a choice, and since we were allowed, in this group setting, to talk freely about our desires, though we were sure that some of us, Gregory and Marsha, were often sanitizing their deviant ideas about nude beaches and dominatrix clubs, and the ways that bodies, even as old as ours could still tremble at the right touch in the right place, how we were all just a memory away from pleasure or pain or that murky water of the ponds in-between. So we agreed on lying in our beds, the sun just razoring through the blinds, soft shadows that often welcomed us to a new day, choreographed on the walls we’d never see again, mouths and noses not struggling for air, broken bones and rheumatic joints no longer buzzing in pain, and maybe, for those that still loved the tussle of music in our ears, a pair of soft, bulbous headphones, never the buds, which were made for youth’s willingness to endure pain to be cool, we’d drift from some pleasant dream, beaches or mountains, the taste of sherbet or grape on our tongues, the goodbyes drifting from our eyes, our favorite memory electrifying the heart for one last pump. And what might we choose? The height and rocking of riding on an elephant in the middle of the ring, a high note carried past the point of the usual voice crack for the high school talent show, the held follow-through of an ostrich-bent wrist of the last second shot that won the game, even if it was only for the fifth grade rec league, of children’s smiles through the years, before the drugs, and the screams, and the accusations, but here the group leader, someone half our age, reminds us of the pursuit of positively, but Hal shouts back at him about the rain, the snow, the ache in the grip of a shovel while the powder accumulates, and your chest threatens to break the drumbeat, to lose all rhythm, and we, through all the nights and days and seconds and hours, so many hours sitting uncomfortably, have learned that life, the ones lived and wasted, and wrung for every drop of joy and nihilism, is a matter of bass and treble in a balance that promises something sweet among the snarled highways of pain, and so he shakes his hands at us, the ring of observers, and we know he’s about to regal us with something dark, another moment of his failure when Rebecca reminds us, her finger pointing, shaky, that per the rules of the group we promised not torment each other with someone else’s mess-ups, another’s warped memory of self-flagellation, that we should allow our final nightmares to sluice through the holes of our fragile nets and dissipate like a rising, rising fog, so we join her in shaking our heads, one of saying do you remember the summer of ’59 or the Spring of ’98, and we wait for Hal to uncross his arms, to smile, to nod his head to a tune only he can hear, but maybe we’ve finally lost him, so we shout for Marsha to tell us the story of the bikers, how she twirled topless among their midst on a blacktop in Nebraska, how they marshalled their hands in their laps except for the end when they saluted her with the revving of their bikes, and Gregory told of the way he was held by a woman in a mask, the smell of leather wettened by his tears, and so many of us are moved to surround him, our hands finding his shoulder, the back of his neck, his forehead and elbow, and when we look back Hal is alone, quiet, eyes shut to a pain we won’t let him utter.
