Gravity Bongs for Those Gone

Landing in Florida immediately invalidated my long johns. The urge to peel off my flight hoodie, thermal shirt, and sweater round my waist became primal. The anxiety in the Orlando airport rose like heat and the outside humidity lingered with an avaricious grin on its cloudface. I wondered, would the swampfolk of my hometown now see me as a senseless eskimo hailing from “Chicago”, an impossibly cold winter wonderland in the great north where no reptiles bask in the sun and no skin singes into sausage? Would the misted windows of my childhood doors remind me of a deeper purpose I had run away from? I feared the arctic chill now trailing my movements would signify a greater coldness in my spirit liable to infect others. The air-conditioned swampland familiar seemed rudimentary compared to industrial mammoth Chicago. Here palm trees dripped sweat in sideways heat. Yawning gators sunbathed in their naive eternity. One-legged herons sang their songs of mediocrity. Perma-confused tourists interrogated new phones for the answers to life’s questions. Yellow streaks on freshly paved roads screamed of upkeep and new commercials.

My father’s approaching white F-250 was somehow a result of all these Floridian idiosyncrasies. His grizzled innocent smile was visible through the windshield’s tinted veneer. Behind it was a hesitant acknowledgement of pain, a semblance of death worn on his face. He didn’t know what to say although he’d no doubt rehearsed various introductions.

“I got y’all all set up in my garage, Dane. All the chairs. I imagine y’all will be chiefin’ it up in there pretty good, so. You having all them over tonight? Sofia, Alex, Joey, and Jackson?”

“Yeah, around 8. Gotta figure out what we’re doing for tomorrow morning. One chair we’ll leave open I imagine.”

“Leave a joint burning and a Coors Banquet cracked open. Maybe every time you take a puff, another memory’ll come runnin’ back to you.”

“I’ve been remembering things I haven’t thought about in years. Can’t really wrap my head around it.”

“We’re all still here, strugglin’ on. That’s what it really is, you know. A struggle. A fight.”

“All those times back when we were sixteen...  I just can’t believe at that point he had already lived half his life.”

We rode for a while in silence. It had been five years since I had a whole week at home. Twelve joints were packed deep in my bag and I knew already it wouldn’t be enough. Years ago with GB (“Geeb”) Squad, an entire ounce wouldn’t last us a week. We’d be melting on the floor, selfish puddles begging for more. Oh, GB Squad. Jesus Christ. I couldn’t remember the last Gravity Bong I took, but I could never forget the first time. With J-Wise, J-Frank, and Ryan on the trail just behind Joseph Salomone’s house. Ryan had promised us a surprise with a knowing smile, though he didn’t spoil what. The four of us had become so close in that seasonal in-between, late 2016. Past the point of texting each other plans and meet-up points, we’d just meet at J-Wise’s gray jeep every Friday after school, take the top off, and go smoke away the first little chapters of our weekend.

The formation within the Jeep was fixed and immovable, although young J-Frank often joked about someday taking my place. I was up front to seem important in the eyes of those behind me. J-Wise was driving, pink baseball hat, always tucking his long hair behind his ears. J-Frank, or JF, or Jackson Franklin, whatever we were calling him that day, would be sitting behind me passenger side, waiting for the next joint to be passed. Behind J-Wise, Ryan would sit with his daddy long legs cramped in somehow, easily the tallest and most inconvenienced. As we had fixed positions in the car, we also had fixed roles. J-Wise was the driver and the gatherer of people. I supplied the bud. Ryan was the engineer of smoke, always packing his bowl named Oscar Wilde with diamond crusted sativa flower and passing it around. J-Frank’s role was to smoke the weed we handed him and to laugh at our jokes.

“Alright, boys. Surprise time.” Ryan said as soon as we parked at the trailhead. Our team, our GB Squad, all trembling with nerves and excitement, exited the gray Jeep and marched down the trail, out of sight of the common people. From within Ryan’s Oakley backpack we heard metallic clinking, a beat of ceremony. Suddenly he kneeled down, opened his pack, and pulled out a big black Yeti cup. The inside was dirty with a ring of wet weed pebbles coating the stainless steel as if weed had floated around and was never cleaned out. Ryan then pulled out a water bottle, a lighter, and a small metal socket. At this point the whole thing had become a magic show for us wide-eyed children.

“It’s time to show you the art of the geeb. The GB. The Gravity Bong.”

My fingertips tingled fiendishly. I wanted to get so high that I’d leave that plane of adolescent anxieties for a brief spell. J-Wise and J-Frank kept giggling and twitching in excitement. After Ryan poured all the water into the Yeti, it was filled right up to the ring of forgotten buds. Ryan then took out a lighter, struck it aflame, and melted a small hole into bottom of the bottle. The black deathsmoke of burnt plastic slithered into the air and dissipated. Then he melted a hole in the dead center of the bottle cap and pressed the metal socket into it. It was now a weed contraption cap. He submerged the now complete bottle into the water slowly as we all looked at it from above, young dumb hawks. I only half understood what was going on.  

“Dane-o.” Ryan said. “Weed me.”

I opened my grinder and he took a finger’s pinch out and packed the socket tight with our heavenly lady Mary Jane. Then he lit the weed and pulled the bottle upward slowly as the depleting water flowed out and smoke quickly replaced it. It soon became completely full of chalkwhite smoke almost brown with thickness. Ryan handed it to me like a messenger delivering destiny and said, “rip that shit”. Upon my inhalation the taste was metallic barbs and industrial impurities. The head rush floored me immediately in disbelief. Sitting on the grass I thought I was falling through it. My legs became numb and I slowly rotated backwards toward retro infinity. It was a haymaker high where stillness and motion collide and distort one another. The euphoria that followed anchored me to that present moment with a bird’s eye view. A high worth walking into the horizon and becoming a cactus for. I was so gobsmacked that when J-Frank asked me worriedly if I was okay, I told him I didn’t know anything and never would. As the rotation continued we were indeed vessels exhaling old apparitions congealing into one amorphous ghast above, floating alongside our thought bubbles.

Before Ryan ripped the fattest geeb in the history of the universe, he covered his face with a Spiderman mask none of us knew existed. When he took his hit, he immediately took off running down the trail like an escaped gorilla, his arms swaying side to side in some animalistic charade. When he trotted back, our rampaging spider ape, we were all rolling with laughter on the gray dirt that colored our knee’s creases. Those times together guaranteed our forever youth beneath blackacid smoke dispersing into the stratosphere toward heaven.

Upon visiting Florida ten years later, one of the first people on my mind was Joseph Salomone. With him I’d had the most darkly serious and honest conversations about what happened. I broke the news to him but he, still living in Florida, was able to see the family first and get some more in-depth details. The vodka, the coyotes. The one thing that we could firmly agree on was that it was too dark to be true. Since finding out, I had been drinking a six pack of Old Styles every night, standing in the shower half-sipping, half-pouring it down the drain to prove time was still real and moving forward. I deeply needed to see Jackson and Alex, too. Neighbor Sofia if she was in town. We all had to sit in our ritualistic semi-circle in Dad’s garage at the bottom of the driveway, that garage full of shitty mismatched lawn chairs, one pink, two varying shades of blue, one red, one lime green, one wooden office chair from 1987, and one Woodman Craft black mechanic stool with legs that somehow still shined. My great great grandfather’s string art portraying herons and rabbits crookedly hung on the chipped white walls. Outdated posters of GT Mustangs and Shaquille O’Neal during his Orlando Magic days. A mechanic’s desk black with ancient greasy hammers, sockets, and wrenches. Soot and oil and rusted gas cans. Cabinets holding Dad’s weed paraphernalia, tools, cleaning supplies, my old records, and Mom’s textbooks. The centerpiece a blue john boat that hadn’t seen water in a year. For some years the centerpiece was a white 1967 Mustang, others a 1983 El Camino, and others a brown 1972 Gran Torino. This was our spiritual ground where we’d sit and reflect on our growths and regressions.

At 8 PM I was sitting alone in that garage waiting to smile in the face of these pure dark tsunamis. As humans we revere the dark in our fearful youth. We cower away from the life that lingers within, that seething monstrous life of scales and mandibles that in a way reflect our own beating hearts and desires. Life all the same. We see ourselves in the darkness, that’s why we fear it. But when a tragedy occurs beyond that familiar life-bearing darkness, it removes the entire spectrum of light and dark, of positivity and negativity, of life and death. The polarities crumble and you are left with nothing, and as I sat at the bottom of my hilled driveway, looking up the toward the single road snaking throughout the subdivision, I was indeed between no opposites. I was simply nothing.

But headlights did appear at the top of the driveway. Joseph’s blue Sonata. He swung it into the grass, parked in his usual spot, and turned the headlights off. In the fresh moonlight he got out of the car while shaking ice around in an empty styrofoam cup. His hair was frazzled and unkempt in a way that signified braininess. He half smiled, half frowned, and was clearly resigned to the sadness that would no doubt permeate the next week of our lives. We greeted each other, sat down in opposite seats, and immediately lit a joint to dodge the dark meat of the dangling conversation. Then Neighbor Sofia emerged from the moonlit ether. She and I had always been friends in the Sanford theatre space, but something clicked when she moved into the neighborhood years later. The former unsubstantial and passive conversations of teenage years were replaced by entire days of philosophical discussions, expressions of deep trauma worth confronting, and pontifications about destiny and future. For us, time was the annual unifier of souls that would otherwise drift away endlessly. She firmly believed the world was meant to be thought about, that indeed our thoughts created the world around us, and that to think and create as much as possible was to put together the puzzle pieces of life and complete this narrative co-authored by fate. Our moments together had an air of significance, chapters ending and beginning anew.

As she came down the driveway to join Joey and I, I feared what her attitude about everything would be. Would she stay quiet and let us talk about it? Would she offer some profound life advice only she could come up with? Her bright white teeth were neon in the night and her curled brunette hair absorbed the moonlight. It was abundantly clear that my longtime friend and neighbor was now a complete woman who understood the world completely because she was at the center. Her face lit up as she took her place in the dusty red lawn chair. Joey handed her the joint.

“At some point tonight could we please go check out the Christmas lights in the neighborhood?” She asked cheerfully. “I just flew in yesterday and haven’t walked around much just yet. That house by me went hard this year.”

“Be a good way to loosen us up, I suppose.” I said while hugging her. “What have you been up to since last we spoke? How’s the MFA in Oregon going?”  

“First semester is going so well. I just got published for the first time, which has been a trip. I mean nobody’s actually read it besides the people on the peer-reviewing committee, but it still counts as a peer reviewed article, so I’ll take it. What have you been writing? Plays still?”

“Honestly… I haven’t been able to write a word since Ryan died. Sometimes I just write his name with an ellipses. It’s been really hard. But I wrote this other story that—"

“What?”

“… What?”

“Ryan died?”

Joey and I looked at her in shock.

“You… you didn’t know that?”

“No… What?” She said as the color drained from her face.

“How did you not… We’ve been posting about it since we got the green light—”

“I’ve been off social media for a year straight. I’ve only seen what people text me.”  

My heart absolutely sank. It completely slipped my mind to text her the news. How could I not remember? Was it even my responsibility to do so? I didn’t know. I could have at least texted her a warning before she came over. But how could I have known to do that, given the stress of it all? How could anyone know anything? She probably walked over in excitement, in happiness, in ignorance, unaware of what happened on December 2nd. I misled someone. I hated myself, and I hated life.

“I mean… Jesus. Do you want the details, Sofia? I understand if not, but—”   

“Tell me everything.”

“He shot himself with his dad’s hunting rifle. Said he had coyotes that needed to be taken care of, and… yeah.”

“Why?”

“We have no idea. Nobody has a fucking clue. Apparently his house was super filthy, vodka bottles everywhere. Savanah was up in Tennessee to deal with her autoimmune issue so he was alone and… I guess you just don’t know what happens in someone’s head behind closed doors. I hate that I keep saying all these clichés, but—

“They’re true.”

“They’re all true! He lit up every room, gone too soon, only the good die young, all that shit.”

“There were a bunch of blank papers around him like he was going to try to explain himself, but… couldn’t make sense of it.”

“But he just got married.”  

When Sofia said that, my devastation turned to anger turned to sadness turned to outrage turned to disbelief turned to sadness turned to anger turned to devastation. He had just gotten married six months prior in Tennessee, and I wasn’t able to make it to the wedding. I never would have thought that would be the last time I saw him.  

Another set of headlights pulled down the driveway and took a usual spot before our eternal standstill. J-Frank and Alex emerged from the car somehow managing smiles and open arms. J-Frank was truly Ryan’s number one. Their immortal backseat bond was a throughline that never ceased or drifted. When I saw him shuffle down my driveway tearful and smiling, I saw someone who didn’t only lose a best friend but lost a vital part of himself. The part of himself that he understood the most was taken for a reason he couldn’t understand at all. His look was riddled with both acceptance and denial but he was clearly so glad to be there. Alex hugged me, asked “what’s good, twin?”, and smiled the same contagious smile that served as my welcome home for the past eight years. At that point in our lives he and I were family. We never lied to each other, however big or small the lies were. I could tell him anything and often did. He sent me every song he produced and I sent him everything I’d written. I’d seen his growth from scrawny band kid “Backpack Alex” to a full-fledged songwriter, producer, and rapper shrouded in a scarlet Budweiser jacket that he wore all the time regardless of heat level. Black sunglasses, a twirling lighter leash, and a stout glow that greatly contrasted his size.

Alex had been the fifth inductee into the GB Squad universe during its twilight days. We crammed him between J-Frank and Ryan in the back of the Jeep for our aimless adventures into euphoria as the setting sun signaled our eventual departures. Although we were clueless children then, all these years later I saw Alex and J-Frank as men. I wasn’t able to see them as such until this moment, when one of our own could not become a man anymore. Now every day we spent aging together would take on a brand-new meaning; one of slow catalysts and fading livewires. None of us had known that growing up was a privilege. 

J-Frank mumbled something unintelligible and hugged me in the driveway as if he too was a second from dissipating into ashes. That was the exact moment I began to heal because until then there was no chimney for our frustrations and grief. There was only the management of a ticking time bomb made from every emotion. That initial healing lasted only one second before the familiar shades of ruin seeped back in. Neither of us could offer a formal hello, only a full sigh as we felt love for the first time in seventeen days. I told him I was so sorry for his loss and he just cried, my neck and shoulder absorbing his tears. Then he whispered that it was good to see me. The type of whisper that’s unintentional, using the full power of a powerless voice. I dragged him toward the garage to join Sofia and Joseph and as soon as we formed a proper semi-circle, the sacred indigos of memory came flooding down the driveway and rose to our knees, our hearts, our brains.

Remember taking shrooms with him and walking down the Black Bear trail blaring John Denver? How ‘bout those Polaroid pictures of him backstage during The Outsiders? Or singing “Ventura Highway” as the first smoke of the day rose in our cloud? Him ghosting the smoke like he always did? Remember him swiping the morning the dew off the El Camino’s hood as it vibrated, saying “Let’s Ride”? Lord… How was he the funniest member of that entire family? He literally tried to fuck a table offstage during that overnight Crucible rehearsal and made us cry laughing as he danced to “Goosebumps” by Travis Scott. Remember when I got robbed by Jarvis and Ryan had those pins in his broken finger so he couldn’t help me beat him up? “I can’t beat someone’s ass with this!” How about when he said in this same garage years ago “Don’t hang out with me if I’m just an old high school friend” and we cried and told him that he was our everything, our brother, and he didn’t have a choice but to deal with us forever. What about Buckingham Back Gate? Drinking the big boot beers downtown?

The last time I saw him, we spoke of our future children and how great it’d be to see them all playing together. I wonder if he knew then that he’d never have children, or if those dreams of continued life were still with him at the end? Somewhere within him but buried beneath a darkness that screamed annihilation. I kept hoping he’d be the next set of headlights undulating down the driveway to join us here. We left one lawn chair open on the far right, in the spot where he’d always sit. We kept pretending to pass the joint to him, and we left an open beer right there for him wondering why he wasn’t drinking any of it. The mission of the night was to smoke ten joints and drink a million beers. What began with forced smiles turned into genuine conversation that gave rise to life, although the silences remained palpably heavy.  

“Should we pour one out?” I suddenly asked JF and Alex.

We walked into my backyard, each holding a bottle of beer. The lemons in my mom’s tree were lanterns in the night as we turned our bottles over and the slow truth of golden liquid trickled into the absorbent green. The foam bubbled out of the grass and settled back in, restful. There is so much beer in a single bottle. Ryan would have enjoyed every single sip of that beer. He’d have told a story, took a sip, laughed, took another sip. He would’ve finished that beer and had a couple more and tossed the empties into the aluminum trash can with a huge crash. But instead, there we were pouring out a dead man’s beer without his stories or sips. As the final dregs dripped out, I put my arms around Alex and JF and held them close. We promised there’d be no more of us gone too soon and we’d reach out to each other if things ever got dark.

“Jackson.” Alex said.  “You need to know you didn’t do anything wrong. You did everything you could as his best friend. You cannot beat yourself up for this.”

“How was it invisible?” JF asked. “Every conversation I had with him, even when I saw him two weeks ago, it was fine…”

“Don’t think about all that right now. The devil’s in the details.”

“All the angels are, too.”

We walked back into the garage where Joseph and Neighbor Sof were sitting with puzzled looks, wondering where we’d gone. We sat down in our spots once more and the night resumed in its spinning roar of smoke and reverb until my father popped in with his bird feeders to put them away for the night. He entered with such rehearsedness that the meaning of his inevitable story was detectable before he even opened his mouth.  

“Something interesting I heard on the radio earlier today. Did you know that each and every day on earth is both as long as it is short? Only six, or… what is it… eight days here is a minute? One day here is only seconds, eight seconds in heaven I think. So, if your buddy is up there and counting the days then it won’t really be days and if you boys are wondering when you’ll see him again, you guys are twenty-five years give or take, of course that’s years and minutes but you do the math and however many days here will only be six seconds.”

“What?”

“Sorry.” He said as he looked back to the house. “Your mother needs me for something.”

He shuffled out awkwardly knowing he dropped the conversation ball. A small silence befell us followed by confused laughter as we looked at each other in disbelief.

“That made no fuckin’ sense, right?”

“None at all. I didn’t know if I was just high, or—”

“It probably sounded great in his head.”

“Six seconds until what?”

My father’s social ineptitude guaranteed that healing and lightness were possible. We still had our soulshine, and our laughter still radiated power. But in this limbo between light and dark the cost of our unity kept recurring to us. We’d stare out into the unlit streets in a trance. We’d momentarily seep into the darkness we now understood intimately, and these pangs of loss colored our kaleidoscopic 3 AM descent into a new reality. It was a matter of dipping into that void and jolting back to our idealistic selves where happiness and contentment were not only possible but mandatory.

Ryan was absolutely my favorite person to get stoned with. After two puffs he’d dance and sing and talk, the main character in this lifeplay. Our words now were all we had left of his rhythm, the beat of his heart and his breath. If he could’ve seen and felt all this love, he would’ve stayed. He should’ve been there right then. In fact, he should’ve descended from the sky, taken the paper wings off his shoulders, and joined us forever relentlessly alive. But somehow instead we all had to wake up in six hours to meet his death. I asked what time we should all show up tomorrow and Jackson through tears said he’d be the first to arrive and the last to leave. With that comment the tenth joint was finished and the millionth beer was drank and it was time for my best friends to drag feet toward cars and end this lowhigh night, somehow both the beginning of a celebration and the end of our contentment.

When I arrived at the funeral home six hours later, the wet sun shone so hot that the arctic blasts back in Chicago seemed obsolete. Our sea of funeral black was one with the parking lot’s glistening moisture flowing out into the nearby streets. Everything radiated the warmth and weight that Florida uses to trap people into comfort. Comfort that seems insulated and peaceful but is actually fleeting and hallucinatory. The first person I saw was Alex, his suit pants sleek and presentable but his face betraying any projected confidence. He stood there with JF, Joseph, and Sofia in an almost complete circle. In joining them I realized the one thing solid among all this liquid remembrance: our movement together in lockstep. We smiled in unison, we cried in unison. We all walked into the chapel together and there he was. Ryan’s sleek beige casket up front, surrounded with whitepink orchids and an ultra-accurate painting of him smiling his blonde cunning smile. Oh, how many times I’d seen him make that all-knowing face! In the room were about a hundred black seats already filling up. J-Frank took a seat by his family. Alex, Joseph, Sofia, and I elected to stand alongside the wall, our exhausted fuzzheads resting against the textured paint.

The funeral processor was an awkward, stout man with an obvious formula to his routine. The sweating forcedness in his charade signified a deep anxiety and need to impress. As soon as he opened his mouth talking about Ryan, I was filled with unbridled rage because this man did not know my friend. The first time the two met, one was in a casket and the other was holding a paycheck. He was an inarticulate jester, and the askance glances I received from JF and Alex guaranteed our stubborn deaf ears. Ryan would’ve roasted this dude to pieces.

Ryan’s father Steve relieved the jester of the podium and spoke of the rising sun. How his own son rose before his eyes and has now set. How their adventures hunting bucks and hooking sunfish in South Georgia were spiritual and important and foundational. For a split second I saw them standing together still, in puffy camo jackets shrouded in morning dew as the sun rose behind them. Ryan’s older brother Bryce went up next and spoke of the intense feeling of being robbed. Robbed of both the seeds of past memory and the fruit future memories would bear. Most of all he was robbed of all the present moments he would have spent with his best friend. Robbery. That was indeed the unnamable feeling that had been plaguing me as well. We had all been robbed, and for what? Did Ryan leave this earth because he was in some way enlightened? Did he possess an answer no one else had? Or was death, the ultimate finality, his only answer to the questions of life? At what point does someone become so likeable that their struggles become shrouded by the haze of laughter surrounding them? To only see the good in others is to blind yourself, and how frustrating it must be to suffer in front of the blind! At what point did his life become a performance for an unknowing audience? And did this performance succeed or fail? Did he know and love himself at sixteen years young and truly see eternity, or did he know he’d be twenty-four years dead, and eternity would have to go on without him?

Everyone alive has had ideas of their own death. How it would feel. What it would cause. Everyone has thought about what would happen if they took their own life, but nobody admits this. Nobody admits that us humans have the potential to hurt and maim and kill, and that’s because we also have the potential to live life fully and find brightness and create more life. So we’re left with a lingering darkness in our minds that goes unconfronted, and we project shame onto that darkness because brightness is tamer, more passive, easier. It’s easy to be uplifting, and it’s hard to be fucking honest. I decided to sit in that chapel in miserable remorse because remorse was the first thing we all felt in this life. We exited the womb sobbing in pain and regret, mourning the limbo that came before. Now here we were all these chapters of life later, grown infants crying because a piece of us reentered that same limbo far too soon. Mourning is within everything we do, from our first action to the last. And what comes in between? Seconds, minutes, hours, days of routines, schedules, plans, audibles, spit, breath, saliva, blood, bones, regret, anxiety, and elation all on a path toward the end. The crust on our morning eyes resembles the permanent closure we will one day have. Closure. Is that why we were here? To close this issue of our friend passing away from mental health? To close this period of pain? What is closure to a perpetually open wound? I didn’t want to close. I wanted to be wide open. I wanted the coming pages of life to be rightly blank so we could scribe our future days with fresh blood ink, but instead the pages were torn out and incinerated.

As these wasp thoughts of death swarmed round my brain, Savanah, Ryan’s widow, approached the podium to close out the service. As she walked up, it occurred to me that I somehow never met her in real life. Ryan had always talked about bringing her by and introducing us, but he never did. As she breathed into the microphone everything was stoic and silent.

“2654 days.” she said. “It seems so few compared to the forever we were supposed to spend together. I wish I could stand here and say our days never came to an end… The first thing I’ll say is I forgive you, Ryan. And I love you more than anything.”

I had never seen such a display of strength in my life. In the face of pure abandonment, she offered grace and love. It made me reconsider my rage. This woman chose brightness, chose positivity, and chose life while I chose to be angry at a funeral processor for processing a funeral.

“Men in this room.” She said later on in her speech. “You need to talk to each other. All of you. If you have something troubling you, if you get to a dark place, it is okay to not be okay. It’s okay to talk to each other, to love each other, and to live life together. How can anyone get better if we don’t address these things that trouble us? Men need to talk to each other before their loved ones are asked to speak on their behalf. I hope you all know you can talk to me, even if you don’t know me well. I know Ryan enjoyed talking to you, and loved you all more than I can convey.”

Not only did she forgive him but she was the only one to mention men’s mental health. She thought of others when I thought of myself and my own pain. I realized I was not the only person mourning in that room, and that my pain was only an example of the widespread pain felt by all. The moment Savanah finished speaking, Alex and I were holding each other as tears flew off our faces. We thought it was over, but then JF stood up and shuffled like a sheepdog toward the stand. None of us knew he was going to speak. He cleared his throat, created confidence, and through a broken voice announced that Ryan was his best friend in the world and he wished he could have seen himself the way we all saw him, as a love giant. He swore to forever protect Ryan’s family, and with his brave words proved himself to be a living angel who could not only see, but love, the dead angels now watching over him. 

As Jackson sat back down next to his parents, he reclaimed his place among the hundred slouched shoulders adorned in black. Alex and I looked at each other and realized that our world lacked love. We needed to spread love. We needed to round up as many loved ones as possible and go out tonight to celebrate Ryan’s life. This onslaught of devastation needed to be turned upside down, and this was the new mission. As we all walked out together, smiles somehow spread beneath our brutal sun. The day before us was possible. Life would indeed go on. We went up to all the friends we knew from years back. Faces we barely recognized now. We invited them out. We went up to the family. We invited them out. We went up to every single person there and told them they simply had to be there. 

Hours later after the most necessary naps of our lives, we were still deep in the grog. JF, Alex, Joseph, Neighbor Sof and I pulled up to Citrus City Craft where we didn’t expect see anyone we invited out. Most of them didn’t even know who we were. They probably just went home to gather themselves, to isolate and hydrate. But when we arrived, we desperate sponges were greeted by every single person we invited earlier, all together in a lifecloud of space and noise where familiar laughter radiated cautiously under patio lights. Savanah emerged with an impossible smile and we approached her.

“We loved your speech, Savanah. It was really special.”

“Oh, that. I wrote that on day five and didn’t even edit it much.”

Day five, I thought. As if a new life unintentionally began on the day he left us.

“I hope you know, Savanah.” Alex said. “That you’re going to take his place in our friend group now. You don’t have a choice but to deal with us.”

“I can do that.” She replied.

JF then looked at me directly as a ladybug landed on his index finger.

“Ryan sent this messenger bug.” he said. “It says we all need to take some geebs later in his honor.”

“It’s been years since my last geeb.”  

“Until today. For Ry.”

“For Ry.”

The night turned from whispers to buzzes to voices to realizations to cacophonous shouts ascending. We simply reached a point of not giving a fuck about how sad we were. Our voices sang and filled hollow spaces. We leaned on high tops spilling everything, our foresight aligned with destiny and we remembered tiny memories inconsequential, worthy of both chuckles and regret, celebrating the fact that nothing would ever make sense. A friend, Hunter, leaned on the bar next to me as we were getting kicked out of the final bar. He said he had work in four hours. We just laughed at the impossibility of having anything.

Suddenly we were all sitting in our séance garage once more, although this time it was four in the morning and the mission was gravity bongs and summoning Ryan’s spirit. There were many more people around now. Everyone had caught wind of the spiritual ongoings. For our mission Alex had volunteered to be the engineer, the “Ryan” of the geeb process. We just needed to assemble the parts. Water bottle. Easy. Metal socket. Done. Yeti or Yeti-equivalent receptacle. I didn’t have one in the garage, I’d have to go and find it elsewhere. I went into my childhood kitchen and tore through the cabinet looking for a thermos or vase or something big enough. Nothing. I was defeated. Hope would be lost and we’d be unable to summon Ryan’s spirit. Needing urgent assistance, I went back out to the garage and grabbed JF who was leaning halfway off his chair in drunken half-sleep. I shook him awake and told him we had a problem only his eyes could solve. Up we went into the other garage, the one actually attached to the house, where Jackson immediately pointed to a dark corner and said “Bingo.” There it was. A perfectly sized empty glass vase hidden behind purple plastic baskets. It was as though we were discovering how to do this all over again.

Jackson held the vase like a sleeping newborn as he returned to the booming cloud of night creatures. Primal cheers from everyone. Alex received the vase with honor and ran to the pool to fill it up. Upon his return he took a lighter and burned a hole in a water bottle cap. Then he pushed a metal socket from Dad’s workbench into the melted hole and burned another one in the bottom of the bottle so it could submerge and emerge like a resurrecting phoenix. He then pressed the bottle down in the water so it buoyed, ready for use, and the preparation was complete. Alex carried the entire contraption, vase and all, to the center of our circle as if it were the eucharist. He pinched some weed into the socket, called JF over, and lit the first gravity bong of the night. He pulled the bottle up slowly and it filled with our historical chalk smoke as a cheshire grin spread across our shared long face. When JF inhaled the geeb, everyone looked up at him like anxious monkeys. He exhaled and coughed horrendously as our anticipation grew fiendish, craving the high that would shift this night into its final phase. Every single person in my garage lined up single file and took a geeb. Even Sofia, who I had never seen take a geeb in my life. Although far too impure for her soul, she took it with a champion’s resolute acceptance, as if destiny had chosen it for her and all she could do was close her eyes, pray, and lean into the inevitable.

As everyone around me turned into deranged lunatics, Alex finally called me over for my turn. A trail of smoke seeped out of the bottle like a genie’s tail. This simple geeb was somehow the result of every single decision I had ever made in life, the mistakes and successes, and it was now my task to ingest these choices and accept them. When I inhaled the smoke deep into my lungs, every smile authentic or disingenuous, every ear drum burst, every stuttered line, every police interaction, every laugh in vain, every post-argument hug, every entry into a vehicle, every bowl packed, every hair on our hands, every rap verse memorized, every song of America that pumped through our veins at sixteen, every millimeter of life that Ryan and I shared, I felt deep within my soul. I coughed my lungs out as the ghost of him green as the undersea stood before me, smiling his all-knowing smile. My head was spinning as his luminescence grew brighter and widespread until it filled the whole garage. He was no longer part of the circle but was now the circle itself.  

At five thirty in the morning Sofia was waiting on the cusp of that nightsmoke driveway for me to walk her home. Early shards of sunlight hinted at newness, at potential, at forwardness. Before going with her I had one last moment with JF and Alex, the last two standing of the night. We tossed the roach of the final joint onto the garage floor. There were about thirty of them scattered and flattened. I looked at my boys, two pillars of my existence, as we stood in our triangle. I put my arms around both of them and pulled them close in a minute’s silence as we acknowledged the emotions of the day. The worst of it was behind us, maybe.

“Well that helped, right?” I asked.

“A little bit?” Alex responded.

“Not really.” JF said.

When their headlights disappeared into the near dawn, I turned and noticed that our séance semi-circle of the infinite night looked a lot more like an empty garage with tipped over lawn chairs and a dead army of Coors Banquets. The jaws of reality were sharpening and gnawing away at that special feeling and I would now have to classify this night as memory.

I joined Sofia and we walked into the dangling moss. The black leaves skittered across the blacktop and matched the sound of the now-awoken breathing trees. When we stood in front of her house, I looked at her constellation eyes and saw both sides of her life, both the thin aired mountain stillness of the Pacific Northwest and the swamp’s humid heartache that was her forever home. I kissed her forehead. Then she kissed my lips and we hugged for a couple minutes without letting go.

“I’m so sorry this is happening.” She whispered to me.

We kissed one more time, then she walked inside her house. All the possible light in that early morning shone on her doorstep. I trekked home through the darkness once more and upon entering my house I could not undress and simply fell face down on my nephew’s Lightning McQueen bed and slept in that exact position for thirteen hours.

Three days later at my family’s Christmas Eve-Eve Party, I sat on a cooler in my uncle’s garage, opposite my aunt Tan Tan as she sat in a recliner holding my three-year-old baby cousin Selah. Tan Tan’s sentimentality about life had always been important throughout mine. She consistently offered something poetic in the face of adversity to affirm the fact that problems are temporary and you can resolve most of them with love. She loved the word “poignant” and always used it correctly. She put family first and understood various energies as they walked through the door. When I walked through the door of that family function, my energy was way off and she told me to sit down urgently with her and baby Selah.

“Hi, Tan Tan. Hi Say-Say”, I told Selah.

My baby cousin chirped something unintelligible and started twisting Tan Tan’s hair, dragging and twirling it in every direction. Tan Tan kept a straight face as her features were getting pulled apart. She put her hand on my shoulder.

“You’ve probably been thinking a lot about acceptance.”

“I’m having trouble accepting that I’ll have to accept this every day.”

“Well accepting the truth is one thing. But I also think it’s great to start thinking about legacy,” she said. “How do you want him to be remembered?”

“At his best.”

“Then tell everyone about him at his best. Write about him. Don’t let anyone go without experiencing his light.”

I thought about Ryan’s now all-encompassing light as Selah put her fingers in Tan Tan’s mouth and pulled at her face. Her young giggles were evident of new life, of content life, of possible and guaranteed happiness. I saw this child and knew that she would have moments of extreme highs. That she would discover joy and elation and value. That we were surrounded by infinite reasons to keep going, and infinite vessels of meaning and smiles. That she like everyone else would experience darkness, but embracing both darkness and light humanizes us and the world we inhabit. That even though the almighty darkness in Sanford was fresh and bleeding, legacy and memory alleviate the pressures of our impermanence. That the stories of our lives are not decided by us, but by the people brave enough to love those gone.