you go first

Kareem Grant, 1980-2025

The blacktop remembers us, or so I’d like to believe. Lord knows I don’t remember. Not much, anymore. Not much not much. But the sun-blasted blacktop, so broad and borderless, perhaps it remembers. It’s a long way down.

That one time someone ran into the woods to find a red playground ball after an errant kickball kick and emerged, screaming and provoking screams, with an earthball-sized alternate, same in every respect other than scale, big as the child himself, that particular red rubber leather of the playground ball, God’s perfect texture, pure joy pure joy pure joy. Of course they took it right away. It had been moldering in the bushes for who knows how long but of course they took it away. Still, the skin of the thing, that thick cowhide red rubber playground ball feeling…. Texture is a substitute for the finer grains of memory for those who, like me, now grow too old for growing old to sit comfortably in the space of joke, exaggeration, or metaphor. I remember we once buried a green army man between two birch trees that shaded the extra swing set where no one was allowed to play; we buried him in that strangely and uselessly-forbidden space and declared it our kingdom. Those are the only things I remember of Wilbert Snow Elementary School anymore, really, the textures, rubbings I made of maple leaves or my dad’s subway tokens or “fossils,” wax paper wax paper wax paper, the thick brown paper bag textbook covers they had us make out of thick brown paper bags. All of youth is paper, its different forms, double-ruled lined elementary school paper, solid blue dotted blue solid magenta, art class construction paper precious and thick, Daddy’s coffee-stained newspapers. There are still memories that carry enough texture to serve as images in my addled brain - the gnarled braille of a scabbed knee, a thumb that knows the seams of a paperback - and I move among them like a septuagenarian in his attic, lifting boxes one-by-one, breathing mothball smells, slightly demented, constantly surprised by what’s up there, finding everything except for what he set out to find.

There’s been a thin, hot anger in me for two months now, anger because the world will not stop, because the chairs swivel and the coffee cools and no statute, no rule, no ritual was tall enough to hold you up from the place you chose to leave. And also, of course, anger at you. Thin, hot, prejudiced anger, uselessly felt, impotently deployed, an emotion for no one and nothing. All my life I have been collecting small grievances like plastic bread tags I keep meaning to restore to their rightful place, when I get the chance. Grievance over the way our school photos have blurred into smudgy nostalgia, grievance over the voice on the voicemail that was clearly relieved to find no living human on the other end of the line, grievance over canceled memorials and postponed prayers that turn grief into a beige waiting room. The root of grievance, after all, is to grieve. But there is also of course a wild and unruly tenderness, here. I find myself wanting to shake you like a dry branch to see if the old green still clings. You go first, and I do not know which I am angrier at, the act or the silence that follows it. Well. It’s not like I’ve talked to you much in years. In decades, I suppose. It’s not like we talked much even then, when our clothes were neon and the fades were pristine. There was too much to do, too much playground, too much blacktop. And now it’s all gone. That is the business of being boys. That is the business of being young.

Times like this, my brain spins with metaphors that annoy me for their sentimentalism and their imprecision. “The mechanics of forgetting are a kind of weather, slow and penumbral,” “memory erodes like a shoreline, like soft rain on a scalp of earth, like the way a city’s neon diffuses into fog,” these things clog the notebooks I do not keep, they hoard the RAM of my brain’s obsolete computer, they crowd out good with bad. Poetry, that kind of shit. Teenaged journal shit. In-an-MFA-and-on-a-deadline shit. I can’t help it. And now the year is nearly over, or beginning, which is the same thing said twice with a different tilt of my greying head. The calendar keeps clean edges that exist nowhere else, bright seams between what is finished and what merely keeps going. Of course, it would be an unforgivable cliché to point out that I am dying too, not to mention tasteless. But we are all always dying, only some of us at a rate polite enough to be ignored, stretched thin across decades instead of chosen all at once. The new year does not promise anything but continuation, and for reasons I can’t fully define and won’t defend, I find myself still looking forward, still counting my mornings, still agreeing to step where the ground is visible, not out onto a void, an emptiness, a long step down. Life insists that I keep going. My wife, my little boy, I’ll keep going. And though this whole thing is stolen valor, a record of a friendship that was last truly alive when George HW Bush was president, I am so sorry for you, for your family, that you will not keep going, that you stopped.

You go first. That’s what you decided, and that’s what we all live with. It’s a long way down. Say it again and let it be an accusation, let it be a request, let it be an obituary - your legs were so long even in boyhood, you took that last step, and you go first. I would wish you well, if there was anyone left to hang wishes on. You leave harsh tears behind you. I hope those who knew you will find the peace that escaped you, and I hope when it’s my time the next step won’t be so far down. May your good deeds persist and your children flourish.

So this was 2025: the year I gained a son and lost more sleep than I thought a human body could misplace, a somnolent and insomniac year, one filled with wonder and grinding exhaustion, a year of setback and resignation to a particular professional future, and also the year I learned that someone I once knew well, then barely, then not at all, had jumped off a bridge. 2025 was a year the past kept showing up unannounced while the future kept doing what it always does, which is arrive anyway, arrive clumsily, cluelessly, with indifference. Winter is here again and I dread the depths of January without drama. Perhaps my thoughts of you tonight are just another example of me taking what is not mine and stitching it into the story of my own life. But then, you were already there, you were always here, it’s not like it was ever easy to hide your smiling, loping, impossibly lanky form, and as I said, the blacktop remembers. So perhaps you’ll forgive me for eulogizing you in this way. In the end, this is what people our age have, the records of aging men, taking notes as best they can, unable to stop looking backward even as the world, indifferent and determined, keeps tumbling forward.