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If you don’t understand, then you’ll never understand. Understanding feels good in fleeting moments. Understanding is a lie. Understanding is true only for a moment, then the balance returns to chaos. Scared, broken, and alone was familiar to him. Happiness and sugar and smiles were sinister in intent. Sweetness always had an agenda. He never trusted feeling well, he never liked it. Good, by definition, was precluded with, “But.”

Even before everything changed. Everything he did, he did silently. Without malice he acted dastardly. He was cunning. Always able to see the crevasses, he filled them with intent. And still he saw himself a victim. Of course, the universe was agnostic. It was an unending flow of water. Wishes mattered like sticks in a stream. Everything goes where the water goes. Choice is irrelevant. Fear and hope are the only things you have once the water comes. Fear usually wins. And he was afraid.

His fear was as nebulous as it was constant. It was provoked by the immediate and the eternal. He walked the world ready to pull away at a touch, but was simultaneously self-righteous.

And so reality had become motionless, inside a box of what he could think or feel. As his body melted, his mind froze. It is hard to describe what could never possibly happen. The worst part about any kind of incarceration, and he was almost perfectly incarcerated, wasn’t the lack of freedom. It was boredom. Freedom is mostly overrated, and almost always misidentified.

The hard truth that we don’t like to think about is that we’re all dying. Degeneration happens at different speeds, but it happens. He stopped the inevitable with a wish. And then he wished for an un-wish. Death has a reason. It may not be immediately clear. When you cannot die it becomes the everything. He wished he could die as strongly as he wished he might live. Lessons don’t come the way you want them. When they come.

There are songs that kill him. Songs kill slowly. They don’t cause cardiac arrest, and at the same time break hearts. This song was playing when, that song then. He couldn’t listen to some because it brought back a flood that he couldn’t dam. And maybe he wouldn’t even if he could. He liked being neck-deep in the water. He liked the ghost of her. She was nicer as a memory. So was he.

I moved to Dallas from Venice Beach on this day 27 years ago. High on Adderall crushed into a Gatorade bottle, I drove alone with a U-Haul trailer hitched to my gold 1995 Saturn SL for 22 hours on Iʻs 10 and 20, with only a AAA map of the U.S. and a Thomas Guide for the Metroplex to guide me. There was no Google Maps. (I wouldn’t own my first cell phone for six months.) And just like many points in my life, I thought I knew much more than I actually did and was much more innocent than I felt myself to be. This was also the day I learned (the hard way) that I-35 splits and that I-35W goes through Fort Worth 25 miles before I-35E goes through Dallas, before reuniting north of both. Turning too early I spent the morning in Keller before a police officer pointed me toward the correct city. In hindsight, that drug-addled, blind, solo escape from Los Angeles is a perfect metaphor for my life at the time. And things were still to get much worse. Don’t get me wrong it was beautiful too. Beautiful and terrible and strange.

They tell you life goes by fast when you’re young and you don’t believe it until it actually happens. The blink of an eye. Twenty-seven years.