20 Years

In the gloaming after your last genial upturn of lips,

An arch so casual—

I find myself uncharitable in my negligence, never once having uttered that your grin possessed a gravitational pull (transcending suburbs, defying longitude) that flung us like-minded pilgrims from dusk ’til dawn through every dim-lit bar and neon-stained trove.

You, brother, were both Pied Piper and Prometheus, coaxing joy from mere oxygen and the sap of negativity, living with an insouciance so profound it made us all yearn for eternal solace.

Born amid The Valley’s sandstone cliffs, where the sea murmurs confessions and the wind repeats your laughter,

You embodied a solar fidelity, chasing afternoons through manicured lawns and raucous southern haunts, poking fun at improbabilities while inhaling the salt air.

Your reposefulness was a contagious affliction: one look at you, and the world’s frenetic minutes slowed to something almost like bliss.

Tonight, I gazed skyward and spotted that familiar point of brilliance, your spectral cameo on the canvas of stars—

And I am consoled, convinced you remain there, recumbent, patiently awaiting our arrival.

Each glass I lift—filled with your preferred amber nectar—carries me along life’s battered boulevard.

I hear you in the wavering boughs of The Byes, in the syntax of random car horns: the riffs of life, notes bent by your presence.

You are an alter ego of breeze and bone, now flickering through frequencies of memory.

And as manganese birds fall silent, as tides cease their habitual ballet upon the shore, as dawn shirks its daily duty, there you are, flickering as an incandescent filament—

Illuminating corridors we thought forever shuttered.

When dust is all that remains, and steel succumbs to rust, we will all be compelled to align our existential asymmetry,

Yet even then, in the solemn hush, your grin fluoresces: a calibration for our sorrow, a pivot for our grief.

Should we encounter a soul whose veracity shatters cynicism, whose warmth rivals that cosmic smirk, we’ll know, as it will not be long before our voices harmonize in that universal carol you first conducted,

For we seldom avow the depth of our affection, our dependency, our fierce regard; we stash such utterances in the crevices of reticence—

Emotions adrift, intangible.

But soon—sooner than our reticence dares whisper—we shall assemble anew, unburdened, unabashed, and proclaim with electric sincerity—

How much we love.