Kids get the strangest reasons for doing what they do. I once saw a kid stick raisins in his nose. And then inhale.

I saw another kid innocently answer, “No,” when his mother asked him if he’d pooped in his pants.  And he was four years so the poop was large. We call all smell the poop in the parlor.

And my own daughter: Last night she dropped a glass of milk in the kitchen. She didn’t cry. She just said to me, “That’s your problem.”

I like muscle from certain body parts. I like to watch it ripple and resettle only to twitch and glide under the skin like a snake rippling the surface of muddy still lake.

Steady won the race. Though we both knew that if we finished it, guilt would ensue. The heaviest guilt known to two young men our age, so far. We were related, though not by blood. But even if we had been, would that have stopped us?

Us? I could only speak for myself.

Yoga looks so important. When you move slower, people tend to take more notice. Posing lends itself to importance. Like soft military alignment.

I want my whole life to be yoga. I could take a class I suppose. Instead, my face presses against the storefront window; I watch people moving, posing, breathing, living the way I want to.

I had a crush on a guy who was with someone else. Knowing this, and to comfort myself, I headed to the local Seven Eleven for some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (my drug of choice back then–Cherry Garcia, one of the very fewy flavor those guys had back then)

And coming back from Seven Eleven a song wafted from a passing car. And it was at that moment when I realized: “Shit. It’s never gonna happen, is it?”

“We’re still your family.”
“Don’t be a stranger.”

These were phrases I’d heard from my family over the years. Now that I am actually coming back to my childhood home, the voices carry through me in a hollow sort of way. I’m hoping that by seeing my brothers, in person, and maybe even visiting the grave sites of my parents, that those hollow spaces will fill in. I just hope they fill in with something good.
But I guess that is up to me.
I arrive into town and decide, before heading to one of my brother’s homes, that I will travel through the town square. I see familiar buildings that no longer have familiar names. Only the barber shop is still there and I think it might even be the same barber from forty years ago. I’m too scared to find out.

My rented car crawls through to the stop light. I turn right. I park at a grocery store and go inside. The place is now owned by Asians.  I see a flat screen flashing from a corner of the market. Why would they have a flat screen here? I peer closer. Oh. It’s contest. Or a raffle. It’s hard to pay attention to a town where times seemed to have stopped and sped up at the same time.
I pick up a few sundries and lo and behold, they accept debit cards, just like the rest of the world. I get back a receipt from from an Hispanic teenage girl who could very well be a child of one of my classmates. I carry my plastic bag out and decided to see my family.

Here I come.

Beginning somewhere, things changed.

As vague as you please, something bendededededededed.

A stuttering of life produced peachable desserts.

Rambunctious bees summer with nutheeeeeeeng.

And that is the way I liked it.

He went between my legs and stayed there. Camped there, lived there. Slept there. Snored there. From 4:30 in the afternoon until early this morning.

We were so hungry at sunrise that we raided my own refrigerator. Evidently we’d forgotten to eaten the night before. We ate things that were easy to grab cold. Spoonfuls of peanut butter, glugs of kefir, a bottle of seltzer water, leftover Chinese egg rolls. Just enough to sustain us for more of the night before.

When you are tying a knot in your hair be sure to close your eyes, if you are standing in front of a mirror. Your reflection will confuse you; it will cause you to bring your fingers back when they should go front. Etc.

The house seemed alone, even with the lights on, even with the parents and children inside–the children rising from the dining room table, and parents speaking wildly to clearing the dishes.

They had told the children they didn’t have to help with the dishes this week.

The children were young enough to be able to figure their parents’ woes for long periods of time.  So they played remained quiet, the oldest one hushing the younger ones as they went upstairs.

In the dining room, the parents discussed things. Their future and the future of their children.