conveyance

My favorite high school senior came to see me this evening.

“Still a lot on my plate,” he reported

And I was ready to find yet another way to tell him how not to be anxious about college

How he will

in fact

kill it six ways this way and back

Not that he would have believed me

The fates had other ideas for my amusement—

Nay

The glorification of my very vocational satisfaction this evening

He

with his characteristic sweetness, openness, and self-effacement

disclosed how he’d become enmeshed in a 

banal but not mundane

family drama

that predates him by approximately 50 years

How he started asking too many questions from his place of sincerity

How he was subsequently appropriated by no fewer than three septuagenarian matriarchs for matters of 

                                the most complicit

the most petty

the most juvenile

and absolutely the most unremarkable

of intrigue

In a dynamic my favorite theorists

The Bowenians

Refer to as ‘Triangulation’

The Girardians

‘Mimetic Desire’

And I 

in my ravenous, unquenchable, morbid creepishness

just call

‘Delicious’

“Well, buddy”

My eyes glistening

possibly gleaming some autumnal overtone

Inhaling slowly with enchantment

“It’s like this…” I say, hopefully concealing the salivation

“You ever had a falling out with a friend?” I ask

Never being more certain of an answer I’ve yet to hear

“Yes I have!” he answers

(And you’ve never heard an exclamation point more resonant or genuine)

“It was over…”

Say ‘a girl’*

Say ‘a girl’

SAY ‘A GIRL’

“…a girl.”

(*his orientation had long ago been 

established in our conversations)

I exhale calmly

with unnameable glee

There’s no way he won’t get this

but also with wistfulness

There may be no going back for him after I let him in on this

And so we lay it out

How people 

loved ones, no less

take on commodity and stock values over which to be shuffled

often directly commensurate to our insecurities

How we learn and assign those values 

relates to having absolutely no spontaneous originality**

in this life

like, at all

(**which is especially hard for him

because he’s a brilliant jazz musician in his own right)

How adults in families

usually aren’t adults with each other

(luckily, he was already starting to catch on)

 How we draw people in

over to our lunch tables

Because we all know these bullets have our names on them

And they’re too much to dodge on our own

“Did you by any chance become friends with that guy again?” I ask with the most earnest of  
     -jadedness- 

“Yes!”

“What a gift!” I say

Out of both sides of my mouth like an asshole does

He fully confirming (through some probing on my part)

what I already knew:

They achieved this through (at least temporary)

marvelous, mutual, miraculous

consensus

That that girl was no good after all

But where would their bromance be without her?

And after having him boil down exactly the reasons why
      he wants to say what he wants to say to his grandma

He is appropriately overwhelmed

Muttering the words ‘complicated’

‘messy’

As I’m sure he never has

I suppose my work might be done

But to his honest question

rooted in his honest compassion for a brood of kinfolk

with whom on most days he knows not what to do

What the hell do I do with this?

I have an honest answer

Love

With the conviction and the caveats I was given in youth group,

long before I went to psychotherapy, social justice, or divinity camp
          I give to him:

1) These things think us before we can think them

Before we have any option to give fuck #1

2) Just because we understand gravity

Doesn’t mean we can fly

(evidenced by my multiple internal contusions and fractures

after recently trying to traverse a canyon)

But again I say

Love
Especially in these days when I can't quite do or believe it myself

Even as he flails down that ravine as I recently have

Even as his internal, naturally selected wiring compels him to that lunch table

before he says something a bit passive-aggressive to his grandma

(His grandma!)

What exactly that looks like for him

is a conviction he has to arrive at on his own
But I trust him to give it his best

I’ve got some ideas if he comes up short

And I’ll be here