I passed out on the couch before 11 last nite and woke up three hours later. Fully dressed, lights on, I think the weather channel on the tube. Took my seizure meds which kept me up for hours. Lynn posted a clip from the news in the middle of the night and there was the one girl breaking down and then Greg being brilliant, nervously playing with his hair, parsing “angel”. Damn. For some reason that dragged me back into the middle of last August, the nights home, back from my wife’s side in the ICU, not knowing what was going to happen, what the future was going to be, frantically running about the house doing chores, radios and TV blaring, talking to her cats, cooking, cleaning, playing music loud, not eating and smoking a little too much weed. Raw memories, crystal clear. Reliving those days. And feeling guilty, too, as my story was long and had a happy ending, and theirs was just a paragraph or two that ended horribly.

(2009)