Everything begins with a crash. The metal screams when it rends apart, when it bends the wrong way. You're thrown against everything and gravity becomes your enemy. The impact is nothing like movies tell you it is: it's a dry and heavy sound and not sharp and bright. There's not the overwhelming sound of plastic and glass breaking. It's the metal screaming. The day is bright and the drive back to Las Vegas was supposed to be uneventful. How naive and stupid we can be sometimes.

Everyone I love is with me. The kids are my immediate image when I feel the sound of glass tearing my forehead. Derek and Araya. Twins and the trip to Santa Monica was to celebrate their fifth birthday. The weather in California is disastrous in its beauty and Araya and Derek were playing along the shore, running away from the eternal pull of the ocean with their mom, with Jasmine. My blood is warm on my face and I feel something that can only be inertia. Derek has strangely big blue eyes and his bright smile and pretty brown skin and black hair: nothing but jet. Araya has her mother's smile and her eyes are big pools of chocolate. Her curly hair is turning brown, slowly. These children are the end of me because each day I'm around them, I think I will fuck them up somehow. Derek's already said he wants tattoos like mine; Araya asked me yesterday if she can start smoking soon, like mommy and daddy. They have become my life.

What was along the highway was only the dirt and endless nothing of the desert. And the music was fairly loud even thought the kids were asleep. Some mix CD Golden gave me years ago. The music we loved then, it's now filed under 'classics' or 'oldies'. In your twenties you think life will stop suddenly and your death well be in the present. Listening to music I first heard all those years ago, Jasmine reading one of the books we got for Christmas from her parents. Now, I look back and realize that three minutes before impact I could say with absolute certainty that I was happy. Then the reality sets in and I'm thrown against the passenger side door and it breaks my flight.

And it was when I met Jasmine's sister for the first time that I finally felt part of her family. I hadn't yet even though we'd been together for eight years. Her family's Korean and the fact she never got a chance to meet my folks: cancer, you know. Her sister lives in Santa Monica and that's where we stayed. We never really got married but think that's just for the best. Contracts fuck everything up sometimes. And, I'd met her mother and new husband when we went to Pittsburgh two years ago but that was it, a weekend. Her sister isn't like how I'd picture her. She seems so pure and nice and not at all dirty. Jasmine's sister's name is Kelly. Kelly is pretty in the same way you think catholic school girls are: you know they're not really pretty, but there's a slightly perverse way of thinking about them as soon as you see them walk by in what can only be described as a perverse uniform.

Gravity really is vicious and finally, the car stops with such a depressing cloud of dirt and dust spreading around me. The windshield's a memory and the driver's side door is gone. My face on the desert floor and already I can feel dirt sticking to my face all over. There isn't any crying and that's the end of the universe at this point. The car resting on the driver's side and I look up, through the passenger's side window that's no longer there and there's light coming through and I want to move. There isn't any noise other than the rushing cars off in the distance somewhere. We were minutes from home and now I lie in a broken piece of machinery and I don't want to look about to find the three bodies.

In Santa Monica just earlier, a day ago, and while Kelly looks after the kids, Jasmine and I are walking up and down the promenade. We're quiet for the most part but even this silence feels right and not uncomfortable at all. We've reached the point, I think, where talking doesn't facilitate anything and there's some weird kind of electricity we share. I remember the first time I saw her, all those years ago, I think as we go into the barns & noble at the end of the promenade. She begins looking through some music magazines and I find my way to where the graphic novels are kept, still thinking about the first time I saw her. Love at first sight is such stupidity.

My legs aren't there and I can barely feel. Adrenaline. But I can move and nothing hurts much: my head where it bounced off the car door, the gash across my forehead that's only stopped bleeding because there's so much dirt in it. I shift my weight and try to scream out their names and my mouth opens with this intention but nothing comes. It's like death took my tongue. Is death a cat? I'm able to twist just enough to see that along the far edge of where there's still some windshield glass, just on the passenger's side, there's blood and long brown hairs sticking to it. Out the windshield just like that. All those cars, we're just a few feet from the freeway and no one wants to stop because Las Vegas is mere feet away. The last exit sign said Blue Diamond and now here we lie, broken. On the jagged bits of glass remaining in place in the windshield is a bracelet. It's not what anyone would expect but it's become tradition with me. It's all her fault really. It's a thin black plastic bracelet. Jasmine's bracelet, left behind and out she went, directly through the windshield.

How my mother died was cancer and it's difficult not to think about her now. The scent of people dying in hospitals fills my head and immediately that's what I always think about, my mother dying. I'm out in the desert, in pain, thinking about the accident, but my mind is in the hospital, at Keiser in Long Beach California five years ago and I'm in the cafeteria and all I feel like is a diet Coke and a cigarette. My brothers and my father are upstairs, in my mother's ICU room and all we've been doing for the last couple days is wait. Doctor said something about bleeding in the brain, failure of internal organs and she will not live to see Saturday. Today is Wednesday. I pay for my soda and I walk outside and the day is so sunny and so clear and there's a breeze that makes it feel perfect. It's a day to be out and about, even if only to wash your car. Smoke a cigarette and it doesn't feel like irony that for months my mother complained of pains all over her body that turned out to be terminal lung, liver, and stomach cancer. Of course it'd spread and now she lay waiting for death. Sip the soda and it tastes awful and I don't want to finish either so I throw them away and don't put out the cigarette and later I will hear there was a fire in this trash can. Back in my mother's nondescript room and everyone has tears in their eyes. My sister in law's not here yet but my niece is, and she's now seven and is reading her book and I wish I too couldn't register what's happening. My mother's become nothing but a bag of bones and her eyes are closed and there's the wet path of tears and she's no longer breathing. There's no sound but you see the flat line on the monitor. The respirator did its best. There's no doctor and no nurse and the window's open letting the big sky in, the sunshine. I begin to cry as I look out the window and can only imagine, if there is a God, He made this day beautiful for her. God wanted my mother to see the beauty of this world before she went and what a sight it is. Perfect day and my mother's gone after 65 years.

I'm able to manage my way out of the wreckage and I remember Grant Morrison's initial run on Doom Patrol, Crawling from the Wreckage. The graphic novel's cover is Robot-man and he's screaming up to the reader, chaos around him. This is what I'm picturing myself doing but that was just a comic book story. The car, Jasmine's 2010 Jeep Grand Cherokee, rests on its side, on the driver's side. I climb out of the car and into the pleasant Nevada sky, the desert isn't this nice most of the time. Yards away are the 15/Blue Diamond off/on ramps. To the other side is the less gaudy part of Las Vegas Boulevard. Houses just behind the strip mall. The car as, far as the driver this time around, did its job; it kept me alive and safe for the most part. The windows have no glass, all of them. The back end is complete smashed in and bent in ways only a pretentious sculptor could imagine. Broken glass and plastic and metal all over the desert floor. I look up at the sky; my eyes are clear and crisp in the ability to clearly see that plane above, heading south.

Moving to Las Vegas isn't really as traumatizing as some may give you to think. But this sorry town, soon as you wake up in the morning and you don't have to drive home, why simply just not kill yourself? Driving around town and trying to learn intersections sometimes is simply futile. Make my way on the 95/515 all the way out to Rainbow and get off the freeway, if for no other reason than I wanted to not get further into this town and get lost. Just on the off-ramp is that ubiquitous American symbol: Starbucks. And I go in just to rest. Walk into the coffee shop (that's just the very same like every other corporate coffee shop: antiseptic in its appearance, safe in its environment, and pretentious in its intention) and behind the counter she is and she's talking for a moment to someone else who chose to work here. Her smile rips me apart and puts me back together again in a better configuration. Her brown/black hair is up and she has a thin leather bracelet on one of her wrists, a tattoo just showing, red and already growing on me. She sees me and turns and smiles that improbable smile and asks what I'd like. In my head I say, how about you coming out with me this very second and driving off to somewhere, anywhere that's not this Satan's-asshole-of-a-town; lets runaway like children into the night and lose ourselves in each other. In my head I say to her, I want to close my eyes as my hands run all over you, feeling everything that's just beneath the skin. In my head I say, you. But my mouth says, regular coffee. The first time, the first words I ever say to her, my future dead wife.

There is only noise from traffic and I look in the distance, feet away from where the car finally stopped, is a pile of clothes. It has to be considering how it's shaped and I begin walking toward it. There is no sign of Jasmine or Araya or Derek and the panic begins to set in, the adrenaline long gone, and the eventual sense of loss hits me. Walking toward the clothes pile, I look back and see what were the kids' car seats off broken closer to the freeway. My eyes betray me and I'm somewhat embarrassed for crying even though there's no one else around me. Just to the left of the broken car seats, I stop walking, I see them, tiny and still perfect and I want to run to them but already I know it's no use. They're gone. My legs fail me and my body becomes sand and I want to die. I cry without a sound and look in front of me and I'm a couple feet away from her, what I thought was a pile of clothes. It's Jasmine, covered in blood and dirt, her white tee now red and her hips are almost 180 bent the opposite direction and I see tiny bubbles come from her nose as the last breaths she'll ever take leave her. It's pointless and I still brush her hair from her face and use my sleeve to wipe the blood away from her face. She's so incredibly beautiful and I look back and see Derek and Araya off in the distance and I want to immediately exercise my immediate thoughts of suicide. I kiss her lips and when I pull away, there're thin strings of blood connecting us, and I cry myself into unconsciousness.

My younger brother Alex always bothered me. He graduated college and spent most of his twenties not working and living with my parents. He would always just read and play online games and eat. I worried about him even when it was me everyone else should be worried about. But he went on got a shitty little retail job that paid him decent. He did this for years and he hated every second of it'�until he decided to tell everyone in the family he'd been putting some money away for almost five years and he decided to join the Peace Corps. Why, we asked and he said, why not. I admired him from afar for a long, long time and it wasn't until this moment that I really wanted to be him. He's a bit shorter than I am and now that he's lost all that weight, he's in much better shape than I am. He used to have long brownish hair but he cut it all off when he first went to Thailand. He's tanned now and his hands are rocks with fingers on them. I used to make fun of him, call him a dork and an idiot as we both went back and forth spouting The Simpsons lines to each other. He is frighteningly bright and he has no bad vices. The last two times I saw him was when mom and dad died. After dad died, he went off again, this time for China. Or Hong Kong. Or Japan. Or Taiwan. You get the idea. He writes every now and then, he tells me what he sees and what he does and I want to trade lives with him immediately. I will always remember him as that chubby little boy with whom I used to argue about music and movies and books. I love him to death and at this very moment, me, on my knees, out somewhere in the desert just outside Las Vegas, he's in some Far East place and I want him here to carry me somewhere new. Since dad died, I haven't seen him. That was almost five years ago.

Think about what I should do and all those fucking cars off in the freeway, none of them stop and I know they can see me. The blood's coagulated enough that the bleeding's stopped. I look back at the wreckage and I want to tear a piece of sharp and hopefully rusty metal for when I find that old lady driving that new Hummer. Bitch that ran us off the road. They're up to the H5 now. The pain subsides a bit, both internal and not, and I want to be somewhere else. I want to go home but home isn't the house where I used to live, nor is it the house I lived in with Jasmine and the kids and my heart breaks when I think that I never got a chance to see Araya wear that dress to her prom. Derek, he never wanted to become a sports star and I was so happy for him when he called Eli Manning a fag even though Manning turned out to be a thousand times better than his older brother. I wanted to see my children become people I would love forever, people whom I never would hate, people whom I'd know were better than everyone else in this fucking universe. In a few weeks it was time for Jasmine's birthday and a trip to Hawaii was in the works; how happy she would have been. People are taken from you and immediately come the things you never got around to, even the small shit. We were supposed to get the kids a puppy; I wanted to call him Jaden. I was supposed to pay for Jasmine's new tattoo for her birthday, too. Look out into the desert and people go about their own little lives and mine's done. Suddenly I feel as alone as I know I am and I want to talk. No, I want someone to hold me and let me cry. I want my feet to rest and become functional again. And now the extreme feeling of nausea overcomes me and I throw up and I begin to cry and I gag on my own bile. There's nothing left for me and why shouldn't I kill myself right now? No one would miss me and I'd be miserable for the rest of my life otherwise. Look at the destroyed car, the three bodies I pulled back into it. The future's gone, the past is all I have and I want to runaway. I smell apples suddenly. My eyes closed, my mouth tastes like waste and I smell apples. My shirt is torn and bloodied. Everywhere I've blood on me, is caked with dirt. One of my shoes is missing and I want all this to end and I know what I must do. North looks good, and I walk in that direction. For a long time, north has always been the answer.

Memories aren't easily removed and it's fucked the way things flit through your head some times. It's always the first time'the only time that matters the most. The first time is what still, up until now, always kills me. It's the heartbreak. It's the heartbreak, it comes so fucking easily: four in the morning and we're drunk, standing outside, swaying like the breeze is moving us and not the alcohol we've had since eight tonight. She's standing there and her keys are in her hand, metal jagged things that would destroy faces. It's like I can see everything, remember it, and I'm still there reliving it. In my head, and here I am, smoking a cigarette and she's looking at her shoes. She wears black jeans and a black hoodie and a black tee underneath that and a denim jacket over everything and gloves with the fingertips cut off. She's looking at her shoes like they're salamanders. And I smoke my cigarette and I want her too look up, to look into my eyes because, standing there, I just know our eyes will meet and, as clichéd as it sounds, I know I will feel something. The night is cool and breezy but there are no clouds in the air. There's light traffic and the lights above, the street lamps and neon and fluorescent lights. It's a near perfect night, only it's morning, it's a new day that's now four, five hours old. There is no sunlight forthcoming yet from the east. Feels like a moment that's being literally being dragged out for no reason. We both know what must happen but I know either one of us is frightened. We're children trapped in adult bodies. We know our wants but are too afraid to do something about it. I see her nodding her head back and forth, like she's telling herself not to do something. She's disagreeing with something in her head and I want to imagine as she's still looking down at her shoes. I want to look away because the anticipation is killing me and I'm afraid if I look away, I will miss something that would mean something. She. A week ago, and she and I met only two days before. This was before I knew what life had to offer me other than a fat ass and commercials on television. Cellular telephones and e-mail and corporations and the future. But, this is the future. It arrived and people around didn't notice. And, as modernized as we are, she's looking at her shoes and I'm smoking a cigarette. Her eyes are brown and pretty and big and it's like I can swim in them. Only if she would look up. Eight hours go by after the first beer and we're talking. Talking about things that really aren't anything important to anyone other than ourselves. I want to see her smile and I tell her, while we're sitting there for hours, things I rarely tell anyone. I want her to like me so much. I tell her how much I want to kiss her and I ask her what the tattoo on her arm means. She smiles. I want to touch her skin in ways people go to jail for. Falling. It was noticing it's four in the morning that makes us walk outside, stumble really. And we're standing facing each other. Her hair isn't a canyon, her smile isn't a biohazard and immediately, in her black jeans and black tee and denim jacket and gloves with the fingertips cut off, I melt inside the way you know magma melts inside the Earth. Immediately, I want to talk to her. My heart is broken glass and crushed flowers and destroyed cities. My heart is Hiroshima. Nagasaki. My heart is just a strong-ass-fuck muscle. Finally, she looks up and she has an unsure smile and asks if I'm ok to drive home. I'm not but tell her I'll be fine for the ten mile drive south. She wants my keys and her gloved hand is extended to me and I didn't even see her move. At my feet, on the asphalt of the parking lot we're standing on, are what look like dozens of used cigarettes. It's the alcohol. I look at her. My heart becomes everything but tender, everything but nice. I look at her, my eyes gazing into hers, and all I want is to rip her shirt off and kiss her; everything else, well, you know. I look at her, her hand stretched out to me, and I drop my cigarette (number twenty-thousand tonight) and I use my hands, I grab her arms by the biceps and I pull her towards me. She doesn't fight, she doesn't protest. I pull her toward me. Like she's expecting it, she closes her eyes but I don't. My sense of disbelief's been sacrificed tonight. I love her. With her eyes closed, my eyes open, she melts like a chemical power plant tungsten block would (?). With her eyes closed, my hands on her arms, my eyes open, me pulling her to me, I kiss her. We're mid-kiss and I realize, why does they always have a man? Why am I never good enough? What makes me stand out? Why me? We're kissing, it feels like forever. I love the way she tastes but have no reason why I say this. She's worse than cocaine but I love her just as much; such immediacy. I want her to melt. I want her to become a spent uranium rod tomorrow. Do not re-process. It's Wednesday. She pulls back after what I know to be an eternity but feels like a year. Her taste, in my mouth, I know I will remember this forever. The fluorescent lights coming off the streetlamps aren't as comforting as before. The street is volatile and scary at four in the morning. She pulls back and I want to know she wants me. Even, that she likes me. I want her, right now, to become everything I think I want at this very second. Even Ernest Hemingway got shit wrong.

On the desert floor and I hear the noise coming off the freeway, the airplanes above, leaving MacCarran. The sun is there too and I want to leave it all and forget all of the mundane bullshit we always have around us'�like, well, breathing and thinking and I want the world to stop spinning. Always waiting for the end of things. Suddenly I feel like an independent publisher's colophon. A masthead: always present and somewhat sinister because of the small type and no one ever pays it any attention; why would you? My life shattered like a plastic dish and I want'�

My niece is born and immediately I'm jealous until Derek and Araya come, but that's much later. My niece, I see her a week after her birth and I love her instantaneously. She's a little person who I know is better than I am. This isn't about innocence and shit like that. This is about looking into that little girl's big brown eyes and seeing the promise of something better for me. For years I'd go visit and watch her grow into something so beautiful words are never enough. I would joke around with my older brother and say to him that I would give Emma her first drink of beer, I'd let her stay at my house when she ran way, I'd pay for her first piercing and tattoo. My older brother never thought this was as funny as I did. One day, while visiting when I was twenty-nine, Emma was walking about, talking to no one in particular as she held this little stuffed lion I'd given my mom almost a decade before and I just watched her. There was a DVD playing and it was nothing but background, ambient noise at this point. I see my niece walk from the coffee table in my parents' living room all the way to their den. I get up and watch her walk, oblivious to anything else, even me. I have a glass of juice in my hand and it begins to shake so much the ice in it rattles and my mother asks me what's wrong and all I'm doing is watching this tiny person go about her routine and my heart breaks immediately because I want something more. I decide at that moment life's not meant to be alone. I think about Jasmine back in Las Vegas. My eyes are so brittle and my mom's standing next to me and we both watch Emma walk over to where all her toys are in my parents' house and she drops the stuffed lion and sits down and begins tossing each little plush toy about and she smiles to no one and my mother takes the glass from me and all she does is hug me once her tears begin.

I want to give up when I manage to find myself walking along Las Vegas Boulevard. No one's taking a second look at me as I walk in my destroyed life. This town is perfect to die in: as long as you look like you belong here, you can up and die anywhere and people will not think twice about you. Unless you're their valet. The sun is being merciful and the bank LCD thermometer just across the street says eighty-one. Tear off my stained and ruined tee and I walk the rest of the way in just my less-stained tank. My arms were once blank and now they're covered in tattoos, most of which I don't regret getting. My chest feels caved in and I can't breathe. Walk past a gas station and it becomes blaringly apparent I've no money. My wallet became another victim in the desert and I want water. One shoe on and I'm walking to the last thing I have in this world, the last true thing that matters to me and always I've known this. It's only now that I know, should anything had happened to me while alone, this is where I would turn. But the distance from there to here is vast and enormous in my current state. Cross the street and I know just how far I am when I see the street sign, Warm Springs Road. My head alert for a moment and I see a patrol car driving the opposite way on the road, coming south. I want to run out into the street and tell the policeman what's just happened. I want him to arrest someone and put them to death immediately. I want him to tell me everything will be ok. I want to run out in the street and hopefully he'll think I'm just some drunk who was asking to get ran over or shot. He should give me some finality to this. And I think I see him look right at me as he gets closer and I think maybe I won't need to run into the street. The sun fills the sky and I want to die at this very second, I want everything in the world to end, I want me to end and all I can think of is that puppy we were going to get the kids. But his lights and siren come on, flips a bitch and is gone to hurt someone who doesn't deserve it instead of killing me. This town is so disappointing.

I'm twenty-eight and during my weekly call to my mother she asks me when I'm getting married, when I'm having my first kid. I don't really think she even wants me to be married to have a kid. I tell her all girls I've met in Las Vegas aren't really anywhere near a safe bet'�except one. And she says, why don't you marry her? I say, mom, please, let's just stop talking about this and she asks me if I'm eating ok.

This desert city should not exist: people only come here because they want to escape their little, drab, mundane lives. Fuckers. Fucker, me.

My father died almost exactly six months after my mother did. His death was facilitated by the cancer that caused him absolutely no pain until the very end. This is what the doctors told us later on, when my dad was pronounced dead at the hospital. This is after the EMT's tried to resuscitate him in front of my niece whom he was looking after. This is after my dad's brain suddenly all but exploded and began hemorrhaging. He died immediately and the doctor, after the death and all, that's when he told us he'd felt no pain until the very end. Only time doctors seem helpful is then, at the very end, whatever the outcome. My sister-in-law had work and my two brothers and I were left alone by doctors and nurses for five minutes and we just looked at each other and we three had tears in our eyes and no one said a thing at first but I remember me imagining how happy dad and mom must be now that they're together again, wherever dead people end up. I also remember thinking what stupid romanticized thought this is: we die and that's it. There's nothing else in this universe to disprove it: there isn't anything after this life. My younger brother, tanned and made out of steel, was supposed to return to Hong Kong in two days; my older brother had his daughter waiting for him at his mother-in-law's and a wife who got home at two in the afternoon. Me, standing there with the two of them'the two of them seeming far more perfect to me than ever before in our lives'and all I say to finally break the silence is, I miss you two. This is the point in the story that I decide this is all I have, my parents, now gone; my two brothers are living lives of their own and nothing can ever be the same for me and that's the scariest thoughts I'd ever had until this moment. Think about Jasmine and maybe things aren't that bad, I say to myself in silence. My family's become such a fragmented thing and I'm the one piece so far removed I can't think the right things.

Walking up Las Vegas Boulevard and I'm on 'the strip'. Such a fucking superfluous term, 'the strip' But then you see all the cars with their out-of-state license plates and the people in the cars, red from the sun, vacant smiles. See the people in their fanny-packs walking up and down this street. Children walking along this part of town should be illegal. I'm at the Flamingo/Las Vegas Boulevard intersection and there's Caesar's Palace to the left and the, uh, Flamingo to the right. In my one shoe, even the people who stand along each corner of this street handing out their porno/escort/prostitutes/legitimate business flyers ignore me. Tourists, you can tell them apart from everyone else because of two reasons: they actually have their kids in tow; or, they're usually so young and pretty, they're walking around at nine in the morning with tall Coronas or elongated plastic margarita glasses. Walking up all the way to Spring Mountain, where the mall is, and this intersection's so congested I just want to kill myself. The dried blood on my face is warding off anyone who'd want to fuck with me. I see their eyes, looking down. Everyone's eyes looking elsewhere, trying to ignore me: the American thing is, out of sight, well, out of mind'�even when right in front of your face, inches away. My bruises all let themselves known and I'm halfway across the crosswalk. People all around me, some with tee-shirts telling me where they're from: Oklahoma, Hawaii, Nebraska, Maine. Others with tee-shirts proclaiming their fruitless, pointless, futile being here in Las Vegas.

When Jason and Kati finally got married was when they were off in New York. They called me one night, late, and told me. They were drunk and laughing so hard and loud I had to take the cordless into the other room so I wouldn't wake Jasmine up. In their own mumblings, Jason managed to say a few nice things about Kati. They'd been together since, shit, way back in 2005. Kati said they missed me being there and I said they should come visit and then they hung up and went about their new lives together. Jason had said once to me he was never getting remarried. His ex-wife now living in Hawaii and living with some random Mexican guy who rents kayaks out to tourists on the beach. Nick Hornby was right way back then: couples really aren't the future. But, the really funny thing about them is that we all knew back then, when they were first together, they would be married sometime soon. Now, living in Atlanta, I never hear from them. His two little girls and Katie, and I'm so sure Jason's a happy man. For some reason I always thought he was a bit sad but never let anyone in on it. I've only seen him cry once. He's saved my life so many times. The sun's making me delirious, but it's strange the things you think as you walk with one shoe on through Las Vegas: he just saved my life. Imagine your car crashes with you in it. Imagine you wake up and that's the situation you're in. Car crashes really aren't that unfamiliar to me, especially when they're self-inflicted. This is the first thing that makes me smile and I feel the dry blood crack on my face and the loud music and the bright lights of the Fashion Show Mall don't really bother me that much. The sky is so high up there when I think about when I tore my mouth open and almost broke my left arm in the middle of the night. I got stupidly drunk, this is a while ago, and I decided I wanted to leave and no longer felt like I should be there, the Crown & Anchor pub, where I met up with some friends. So I leave and this is all conjecture on my part, pieced together from the bits and pieces that my friends have told me after the stitches and the insurance adjustor and hospital visits and the relocating of my left shoulder. Awake and I'm strangely lucid for a moment when I try to get my car going again and I'm bleeding profusely it feels like there's water being slowly dripped on me. Could have bled to death. I'd managed to make a telephone call, I later learned, and the person I'd immediately called was Jason. This is the middle of the night and he's off somewhere having dinner with Kati and he plowed through the streets of Las Vegas. Maybe I wasn't going to die but Jason always saved me whenever I needed saving. He deserves his happiness. I miss him.

My heart feels like it should stop. It pounds; I know it's the anxiety. The sweat coming down my face is washing away some of the blood on and my feet hurt. People walk past me and the people coming the opposite way on the street look at me and flinch just barely enough to make me feel self-conscious. What I must look like. I continue to avoid reflective surfaces; I don't care to see what death warming over looks like. I've never believed in the afterlife or god or anything like that. It's like believing in magic and if you still believe in fairy tales and shit like that after ten, you're an idiot. At the same time, I wonder if there were some sort of ethereal place like that, I can imagine Derek and Araya playing with Jaden, the little black puppy we adopted from the shelter. I see Jasmine cooing over her new nephew her sister just had. I see the four of us going over to my brother's house for Christmas this year like we'd agreed. My two brothers love Jasmine and are so happy for me. I see all these things and it breaks my heart thinking them even though they are happy thoughts. But they are happy thoughts about wishful things that will never come to pass. I walk and feel my neck knot and I feel like falling on the hot concrete and just being done with this. Magic doesn't exist and I want to tell myself, aloud, Araya and Derek and Jasmine, my family, are in some kind of better place. Earth is hell, so any other place would be an improvement. But there isn't anywhere, anywhen else but here and this makes me stop, the pain in my neck, the newborn tears and I stop and I look up at the blue, blue, bluer sky, and I fall to my knees, not caring about anything and I scream like banshees do in that imaginary place that could never exist. People around me look away, some run. This screaming, blood-covered man in the middle of what they think is their vacation. I know there'll be photographs of this on the internet later but I don't care. It's not catharsis I feel. It's not even sadness, not right now. My eyes are holes in the universe and everything's simply spilling out because there's nothing to hold everything back. I want to scream and scream and I have a mouth. It's a curse. People around me and I feel my throat get sore and I want it to bleed. I want to drown in my own blood and I never want to open my eyes to the sight of everything around me without Jasmine and the kids. Might as well end everything now because everything else I hold dear's gone away. I feel alone but only just when I imagine everyone else in my life, everyone else in my life have better things than me at the moment and I do not want to be a distraction. Screaming, blood and tears mixing on my face. North is still the best bet and I want to be held. When you feel ultimately alone and destroyed and impossibly irreparable, where do you go?

And my older brother gets married in 2001. I hated him then and still I paid for his portraits and video. I'm not a nice guy to him all day and am late for the wedding. Drinking gets in the way of a lot. The reception's at a horrible hotel and I drink vodka all night long. Barely talk to my parents and to my aunts and uncles up from Mexico for this debacle. I remember taking my brother's keys and in my taking off in his Mustang. A glass of vodka in my hand I'm doing one hundred on the 710. Head off to Long Beach and I feel like everything around me is collapsing and all my brother's done is get married. But I'm twenty-two and it's the first time I realized he wouldn't be around forever. It's weird realizations like this that flow in and out of my head constantly. Random and utterly unimportant to some, at this very moment, driving through Long Beach in the middle of the night while wearing a tuxedo, and I realize my older brother, someone whom I've been really close to for almost all my life, is now a man and he's done with his previous life. He's no done with us, his family, but he's an adult and it frightens me. Finish off the vodka and I wonder what I should do. Is this the moment I should become responsible and not the same person I've been for a long, long time. Strange, now, as I walk through Las Vegas and this comes to mind. Because everyone around me now sees a pile of destroyed skin. In my head I'm hating my older brother for fucking growing up. I resent my brother and I get off the 710 and pull into a gas station and buy cigarettes and the black man behind the counter smirks and says something about my tux and I walk to the back of the convenience store and get two tall cans of beer and he smirks again, the black man, and I pay for everything and I drive up to Ocean Street and park and wearing my tuxedo I walk down to the beach and smoke a cigarette, the brown paper sack with the beer lingers at the end of my arm and I walk through the sand, toward the water, ruining the rented tux shoes and I sit and I know I won't be getting the deposit back from the rental and I drink both cans of beer and I smoke a pack of cigarettes while sitting there. Looking out into the Pacific, along the Long Beach coast, there are oil pumping islands just off shore and they're decorated to look like what appear to be birds of paradise. It's nothing but aesthetics around here. Look past the islands and out into the black nothing of the horizon, tears in my eyes, hating my brother for not being whom I've always known, how suddenly it feels he decided to end that portion of his life. Drunk, in a tux, twenty-two, and now I can laugh at myself for being that naïve then. This thought snaps me back to reality and my blood covered body, one shoe and no shirt on. On my knees in Las Vegas and I open my eyes and see a girl, a little girl looking dead at me from across the street and immediately I see Araya and I pass out, my head hitting the hard, hot concrete of the sidewalk with absolutely no emotion. My older brother.

It's the pain that half-wakes me, the pain from my head bouncing slightly off the pavement. I'm dizzy and there're people all around me, looking at me, no one in a hurry, hurry to call an ambulance. This town. I lay there for a moment and images come through my head but I can name them. Are they abstractions? Is this dementia taking hold? Is this what goes through your head when you want to end it all: images that look like they could be a cake, a car on fire, a naked baby with wings? I don't and suddenly, for a moment, quick as lightning, my heartache stops and I open my eyes and I see'�

'�we're walking along through Las Vegas, Jasmine and I and the movie just let out so we're walking along downtown, the dilapidated people who hang around here, the tourists, the buildings that screamed 'promise'� at one point in the distant past and I reach and take her hand in mine and immediately, there's immediacy of contact and I realize, after just a bit over two years, I love Jasmine. I do and it makes me smile. We walk and she's smoking a cigarette. This is a long time ago, before the kids came and we're out, like, on a date. Is this someone I can see myself with for the rest of my life? Is this someone whom I'll interest sufficiently that she will never want to sleep with another man? She's smoking her cigarette (Parliaments with recessed filters) and doesn't see me looking at her; the stupid smile I know is spread across my face. Her pretty little Korean nose and you can see the black outline run a bit above her blouse's neckline, the new tattoo she began getting. The permanence of the ink is an obvious metaphor. It's that point, where most people ditch each other, when feelings begin to get in the way and you're a frightened child and decide to dump whom you're with. The point where you begin to think there might be something else better for you than the person whom you wake up next to every morning. These old casinos are like desperate house wives. I should know this city better but I've no idea what any of these streets are downtown. I want to kiss her right now because the realization's becoming so overwhelming and I do, I stop her, she says, what's wrong? and I lean in and kiss her and she kisses me back and her hair falls between us, the smell of her shampoo is miraculous every time I smell it. She kisses me for what feels a really long time, longer than three hours. We stand there and it's like I'm watching a movie and I can see us, like a stupid-ass romantic movie, kissing in the middle of Las Vegas and it's a clichéd storyline. She pulls back and says, what was that for? and she sees me smiling. I tell her that all this time we've been together, we say 'I love you' to each other, you know, and, Jas, I want to tell you that I do fucking love you. She looks at me like a crazy person. She says, what? It sounds stupid, I say, but right now, I don't know, it just popped in my head that every time I say 'I love you' I mean it with all my heart and I really don't think I could see us not lasting. Her head tilts a bit and her longish brown hair tilts that way too and smiles and says, I love you too, you know that, right? She says, for a long time I've known this and have always wanted to tell you pretty much like you're telling me. She leans in hugs me and I feel her breath somewhere on my skin and I want to maybe ask her, maybe, what she'd like to do in five years, but that seems even too corny for this moment. We continue to walk with no seeming direction and'�

'�eyes open finally, head filled with rational thoughts instead of memories and there's people walking over me, no one stopping to help. Assholes, everyone in the world and my head hurts and I know I'm probably bleeding from where I hit the ground. Stand and look across the street, toward the empty bus stop and the poster on the shelter says something about a new movie with that kind-of-gay actor and the emaciated actress and they're in Paris. I resume my walk and I'm covered in sweat. I look like a jet plane fell on me. And I walk and as I near Sahara Boulevard I look up at the sky and want to see something new there, but it's all blue and clouds and heat. There's nothing there, in the sky, and the point north is what stands out the most and I want to runaway to somewhere comfortable. The place I've felt the most alive and quiet and perfect in my entire life. Everything else gone, it's the only place. The blare of horns as I realize I'm standing in the middle of the street. How I got here, I've no idea.

Was in California last week, hanging out with my older brother and we go have a beer. Jas at home with the kids, my sister-in-law with hers. He's remodeled his house and it looks so domestic and nice; perfect for him. He's lost some weight and says that it was that first heart attack that really frightened him. He says that Emma's the primary reason, but almost dying, that better set you straight, you know. Where we go is a dive bar just up PCH and Cherry. It's a pretty nice day and we're talking and the outside world's very insignificant at this point. He says, I worry about you, I always have. He says, I don't want to sound like dad, but sometimes I wonder if you'd be in a better situation'�and I lift my hand and stop him from continuing. My older brother has always been far more perfect than I could ever imagine. He doesn't know this because, yes, he's losing his hair, and is bit overweight, works like a dog. I love him for this. He doesn't know this because I never tell him these things. I should, I know. He ignores my hand, he continues talking, saying things that break me apart inside because all I hear is my father and mother when the words escape his mouth. Sitting on the outside patio because, well, you just can't smoke anywhere fun in California. The sun's out and is being kind by not being an asshole about it. My older brother talking, talking, talking and I just look at him and I want to tell him how much I miss him, how much I admire him. Every time since I was eighteen that I see him, he's something bigger than I can think of. He's the type of person I wish I could've been back then. Now, I really doubt it. He's wearing that sweater by Abercrombie & Fitch mom got him years ago. The person I eventually became's the kind of person no one would choose to be. But it's one of those fucked up roll-of-the-dice things and this is who I am. But as we sit, letting our beers warm beneath the toxic California air, talking, people would want to imagine what someone like him could ever possibly have to tell someone like me. We're so slantedly apart it's curious we share the same family and upbringing. He's saying he's always worried about me, for years, when I stopped talking to him, when I would tell him she didn't want me around, whenever I would disappear while we both lived at home. He says, I always thought you would die. He says, all the stupid fucking crazy things you told me, always after the fact, I really thought one day that call would be someone telling me you'd died. I want to say he should've never thought that but that's foolish: handful of accidents a year, near-death experiences fueled by drugs and alcohol, minor self-immolation fits, and then there was the cutting. The disappearing. The abandoning any sense of responsibility years at a time. The failing grades and the arrests. The random acts of violence I put my body through. He knows me better than I want to admit. He stops talking, like he's thinking and looks into his beer stein like there's a prophecy forming in it. His hair is thinner now but still nothing but black. His hands are tender, the way they look with his wedding band and the ring our father left him when he died. I look away for a moment, feeling uncomfortable in that way first dates make you feel when they're not going right. Out on Pacific Coast Highway, the traffic's so smooth that I want to scream at everyone to stop, stop already and realize this is the greatest day in their lives because they have it. Look back and my brother's looking at me and has what can only be tears in his eyes. He smiles briefly and he was the one of us who was blessed with a straight, un-gapped smile. He has dimples he never outgrew. He looks like he did when he and I would play when we were kids, the way he'd say Spiderman's or Tarzan's lines. I see him like the man I always knew he'd become; the man I knew I'd never be, ever. He says, I've always been so jealous of you. I say, what the fuck are you talking about? I say, I'm the biggest moron I've ever met, yeah, I'm so surprised I'm alive now. He half-laughs and says, you're such a fucking idiot. He says, you've lived the type of life a lot of people never do: all the hard bullshit you've gone through, and now you're here, talking to me, telling me things about your kids and Jasmine. You tell me, he says, every time you were in a new place, meeting all these people you think are so amazing, and all I feel is a sense of regret. He stops for a moment and sips his beer. He says, do you realize some of us are so happy we tend to forget we took the safe, normal route? I say, dude, if I could go back and change how everything came to be, don't you think I would? He smiles again and I feel ready for death because my older brother's smile's our mother's smile and it feels comforting as it's directed at me. He wipes his eyes with his hand, the one with our father's ring on it. Still smiling he says, you fucking idiot. I say, what? He says, you know I love you, right? I say, yeah I know. He looks down for a second and then says, I'm glad you had the life you had. He says, I'm so glad you've experienced more than I have because you have no idea what a thrill it is to hear you excited by all these things you've done and gone through. You have this life, he says, some people would love to have. Inside my head I can't believe he's saying these things to me and saying them with that sort of conviction he always has. He says, I love you and I wish you'd stop living so much sometimes because I can't believe you're still here, telling me about everything that goes on in the world and you inadvertently make me feel I'm in a cage. You're a fucking movie sometimes, he says.

The heat is murdering me while I walk and slide inside the Sahara casino, if only to breathe in some second-hand smoke, or steal drinks from the old people who aren't paying attention while they play the slots. Walking into the casino you always feel so disoriented: all the noise and lights and people and colors, and you just want to set off bombs every time you hear the hateful tink-tink sound of coins falling into each other. How I look, I can only imagine there's someone specifically assigned to follow me via the closed-circuit cameras all over above everyone. Someone's probably talking to a supervisor and asking, should we excise this fucker? What do we do? So I walk and walk through what's designed like a maze and only called a casino because the signs say so. In the middle of the day, a Las Vegas casino is the saddest thing, and the only thing that can best describe the horrible idea of Las Vegas. All this city is is nothing but a distraction. A distraction at the moment I think I need. I remember my youth and I want to inflict some wanton violence on someone. That old adage of taking out anger and frustration on people. Who ever said, you always kill the one you love, never really realized how much better killing someone whom you care nothing for feels so much better. Figuratively speaking, of course. And while these blood-wanting thoughts circle about in my brain like sharks, I want to tear off my own skin and flay myself with. Was it my fault, everything that's happened? Was I not paying attention? Did I look away for an instant, but that was the instant that mattered the most in my life? Do I want to blame myself so I can finally carry out the frustration out on myself? Stupid boy-like thoughts. And I walk by a group of three old women with sagging breasts and all three smoking and you just know they all have that kind charcoal-like voice that's rough like gravel. They're talking to each other while neither looks away from their slot machines. Each have a cocktail sitting next to each other and when one of them wins twenty nickels the all cheer enough that I can slip in behind the one closest to me and grab her purse and her glass of cranberry juice and vodka. No one notices and immediately I'm waiting for the security people to come at me. And I walk fast, toward the bathrooms, people get out of my way because how I must look right about now, after being baked and trashed by the world today, must be what everyone else must think bad breath looks like. Stealing an old woman's drink and her purse in a casino while she celebrated her dollar win with her equally fossilized friends has become the definite highlight of my life. In the men's room just off the bar on the left, I gulp down the cranberry and vodka and I feel my lips crack when I smile.

The beach was deserted at four in the morning, an odd jogger every now and then, maybe with a dog on a leash. The lights off in the slight north from Los Angeles Harbor were steady and shone without a question to ask. Walking through the sand in Long Beach, this is years ago, a way fucking ass long time ago. Long before I'd ever moved, before anything that used to exist around me in Las Vegas, before the fucking crash. Before I find myself in a Las Vegas hotel bathroom, looking through an old woman's purse after drinking her diluted cranberry and vodka; here I am in Long Beach. My parents' house is four miles away, further inland, to the east and the lights above me are fake stars: pollution. Every single time I come here I do feel so calm I've nothing in my head. But this was a long time ago and what brought me here was losing my girlfriend. This is me, a teen age boy, crying at four in the morning while walking along the beach. This is me now, in a way. But then it felt like there was nothing else I could do but come here. Was the first place I thought of. Before anything I have/had now even existed, this is me coping. Thought I was in love with her, with Roselyn, but of course I wasn't, just thought I was. Sex is that way, I guess: guys are idiots-plus-having sex on a regular basis-plus-with a pretty girl-equals-the thought you're in love. My heart broke when she said to me she'd rather see someone else, someone who she thought was 'cooler'. This was our break up, this was how everything came. Looking back now, of course, this is funny to a fault. But along the beach I feel the way I thought no one should ever feel. I thought this was the best thing to happen to me, Roselyn, and conversely, the worse, the break-up. Ridiculous now that I think about it. Me, all of eighteen, nineteen, whatever. And this is my own selfish brain thinking no one should ever feel what I'm feeling as I walk through the sand, the sun nowhere in sight. Light up a cigarette and walk back to my car parked on Ocean Street and my eyes are sore and dry but puffy. This is me when I thought nothing else would matter. This is me at my most child-like. But this is also me when I felt for the very first time a sense of loss, a sense of interruption. This was the first time my world fell apart only I didn't know at the time how stupid I was.

The break is welcomed, of course. A men's room in a Las Vegas casino's the place you'd least think you would find some kind of solace. My lips are bleeding and I know this because the mirror tells me so. Leave the empty cup on the sink counter and walk into stall and begin looking through the old woman's handbag. Weird how we move on from one moment to the next while forgetting the bigger picture. Our lives are like television programs that way. Television commercials. Footsteps on the tile floor and I see shadows move beneath the stall's partitions and I wonder what I would do if these are security guards. Still, this thought's not too long inside my brain. Inside the old woman's purse is everything you'd think to find and I've no idea what it was that I wanted this for. What was behind me stealing from an old lady? Dry skin on my hands and it's like I can feel it crack when I move my fingers. Cigarettes, checkbook, lipstick, assorted casino chips from all over the strip, change, gum, a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels. I'm deflated when nothing I see seems to match what I thought I might find. This razor wire and my head hurts. More footsteps, the sounds of flushing urinals and the smell says someone's taking a royal shit somewhere in here and the smell, the fetid odor, seems appropriate for my inner workings right about now. I can't stifle it so I cough loudly and everything stays the same after it. I look down at the open purse on my lap, the flush of the toilet and I hear the last person I think is in here leaves after not washing his hands. I look down, and I think what else am I going to do after this little diversion? I look down and I see beneath all the accumulated crap belonging to the old woman, who, I'm sure, has already discovered the purse's absence, that there is a small billfold with five one-hundred dollar traveler's checks, all unsigned. If this were a movie, this is what should make me happy if only for a quick moment. This means nothing right now.

Everyone's laughing already and that's a good thing because this shouldn't be anything that should be sad. Funerals. This is what I think as I sit outside and Raul's gone, dead because an idiot who shouldn't have been driving because he couldn't tell what a red light at Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard means. Mark's inside crying and his family's here, ingesting all the alcohol it can: family as a collective parasite. This shouldn't be sad because I know, once he was gone, he was happy. The things he wanted to accomplish were done. People go near-century without getting even one thing done. People are fucking idiots. People aren't anything that's worth the skin across their foreheads. Remember walking all over Los Angeles, years ago, talking about planning for the lame future ahead of us. Raul always wanted to own his own house; he wanted to open up a business in West Los Angeles; he wanted to travel; he wanted to have children. His children, now, are sitting out front with Mark and his family, that bewildered look of surprise on their faces and I'm sure they're wondering why dad, why Mark, is crying. I'm sure they're asking themselves, where's dad, where's Raul? Children's bliss is to know absolutely nothing can hurt you at all. All these things we used to talk about are done accomplished. Raul and Mark, off to France a year ago, to celebrate twelve years together. Raul did open that wedding planning shop and it wasn't always as profitable as he'd liked, but he was so happy. He'd owned his own house for almost twenty years. These are the things people forget but always used to talk about with friends and family. People, we're idiots thinking we have all this time left and there's those of us who do things without even thinking it's a race. I remember going to visit Raul just after Jasmine moved in. In Valencia California, the weather's so fucking nice but it is a bit off the beaten path from anywhere interesting. This is as close as Los Angeles gets to upstate as it can. I remember the kids playing in the back yard with Mark's two dogs. I remember the lack of ostentatious décor Mark had a penchant for. We talked and had dinner. The two of us, while Mark stayed behind to look after the kids, went into Huntington Beach for most of the day and the calls came from Mark almost every three hours, just like when we were younger and Mark thought Raul and I had something going; I was trying to steal Raul, Raul was just waiting for the opportunity to cheat on Mark. I always hated Mark but for some odd reason, he made Raul happy. In a restaurant just off Pacific Coast Highway, Raul and I talked for hours and I told him everything about Jasmine aside from the usual 'I met a girl'� bullshit I always used to call him about. You see the lights and the tinsel and the greenery all over inside the place, ready, waiting for the upcoming holiday and the music playing's that awful Christmas bullshit. In the restaurant, the noise is at an acceptable level, and the lighting's just right and Raul makes a weird comment about that tattoo I'd just gotten on my right wrist and I say, what, it's just my mother's name in a type of Cyrillic. Raul laughs and his black-black hair falls just over his eyes. There's no gray in it. I ask him how he's doing since last I saw him (that being almost six months) and he says he's doing fine, great even. He says it's this time of year that always gets him down. The restaurant's decorated in such gaudy colors, red and green and white. It's Tuesday and he looks sad but healthy. He says he wished all holidays were crossed off all calendars in the universe because that would mean no more Christmases would come. He hates it now, he says. I remember when we were younger'me, eighteen; Raul twenty-four'and how I would say to him how much I hated the banality of religious holidays. But it doesn't hit me, then, sitting in the restaurant. There are no tears in his eyes, but there's that bright smile. He says his mother would always love California in December. I look around the place, families all over. The waiters and waitresses running about, collecting drink orders and handing out plates of food that are steaming hot and smell like gardens. Everyone's smiling their own particular smile, for their own particular reasons. It's December twenty-sixth. I look at Raul and he's looking at me. 'I hate today,'� he says and begins to laugh a little. It breaks me apart inside when I realize it, while he laughs a bit nervously. My mother won't be dead for another three years, neither will my father. My own family will be alive for a few years more. But it's Tuesday and it's now dawning on me and it's me who begins to cry, softly. Raul smiles a wan but great smile and reaches across the table and takes my hand says thanks. It's been ten years since his mother died in his arms. This is my memory, at Raul's funeral. He was the best person I know and I want to remember him as the only person I've ever known to have lived the best possible life any of us could ever live. My best friend, gone, while people laugh and drink and eat and I want to have a MAC-10 and murder them all.

My legs should give out, my heart should implode and staying behind never really was an option. Now, the scenery is horrible because it reminds me I can never leave. This horrible town is my end. should have gone millions of seconds ago and now I'm walking back, my wife and children done, my family long gone and spread about the world. There's no reason why I should be here.

Just outside the hotel again, there's a hot wind coming from the south and my clothes feel as if they're covered in dried syrup but I remember it's only blood. Mine and theirs. I can hear my pants crack with the breeze. Hot wind and I feel the sun baking me again and when you stand immobile for a while underneath this type of heat, it makes you wonder why people choose to be here for vacation. The purse is long gone, into a trashcan in the men's room, then I went and vomited into the trash can. Standing outside, the air isn't charged anymore for a moment, and for another moment I feel energy unlike I've ever felt. It's the way the skin that covers my feet that tells me I'm still here, still alive, still waiting for it to come. I turn my face toward the sun and I imagine rain coming down right now, cold and frightening in its intensity, would be so unwelcomed. My eyes closed and I see the red of my eyelids and the hot wind all over me. The skin on my face feels tights and dirty. I lift my arms above my head and there's the noise of the horrible traffic at this horrible intersection'Sahara and Las Vegas Boulevard. I lift my arms like they weigh nothing but muscle and bone. How I must look and I don't care. My eyes are closed and it's one of those feelings that come every now and then, the desperation of being son incapable of doing much but stand here and let everything wash over me for just a fraction of a moment just so that I can breathe again. When I was younger and much more stupid, it used to be me just reading and reading for hours, just enough for me to forget whatever's important. Yes, it's only just that momentary but it makes you feel like you're weightless. My arms stretched over my head the way people surely stretch while they wake up and my skin feels the color of bacon on a skillet. I open my palms and I feel my fingertips as they feel space. We are, each of us, just volume in all this space. I open my hands and in my right hand is nothing but it still feels like I've just let a bird go. In my left are those traveler's checks and the air comes and picks them up like those leaves you read about when it's fall in the east coast. My eyes closed and in my mind's eye I imagine what their flight looks like, where each one is going in their jolty and haphazard way. How paper flies so violently and meanderingly through space. I don't feel it at first but the adrenaline hits all the same when I finally open my eyes and I see the concrete sidewalk coming fast toward my face. Vertigo and loss of equilibrium. I hear a woman gasp somewhere behind me and I hit the street and the pain isn't rain.

There is always a time when I tell myself to not do the same stupid things after I've, well, already done them. With girls, with family, with friends, and most of all, with myself. All those misshapen tattoos that still linger beneath what I have now. All those things written over the years that should've just stopped from coming. These aren't regrets, not really. The experience of that first mistake should be sufficient to remind you not to do it again. To make that conscious effort to be better than you were last week, yesterday, an hour ago.

The woman asks me if I'm ok, that I fell and it looked that I was really hurt. Did I want to call someone, she asked with her cellular phone in her outstretched hand. Could she call someone for me, she asked, is there anything that I felt like I wanted. Did I want to go to a hospital. Was I lost. Am I ok. Always these questions come when I think people all around me should already know the answer will be no. But I know not everyone will know this. My own way of thinking always leads me to these wrong conclusions. The hot concrete seems to have cut into my skin, it feels that rough. The woman kneeling next to me, dressed in those kind of expensive jeans I just want to set aflame. Dressed in that white, white blouse that looks so good on her and I wonder were the circumstances different, would I consider betraying Jasmine with this woman and her black hair. Would I put in jeopardy almost every thing I've thought was dear to me? But who the fuck cares really. My life is done and I immediately think if I should start over. The woman looks down at me and has a look of concern on her face, there are other people just walking by, ignoring her and me. I wonder who gets to wake up to her face every morning and whoever he is, does he appreciate her enough. Does he appreciate her enough to know that each and every morning will be the best of his life because she is there? These things I think. You hear the loud cars because they're going way too fucking fast down the boulevard and I just want to stop walking, I want to stop breathing and die with this woman's pretty face engraved somewhere in my memory because this will be a far better sight than everything I've had in front of me over the last few hours. My feet feel cracked the way you imagine those deserts in Africa, dry to the point that it hurts you to even see those images. I stagger to my feet and she holds my hand as I do, and she doesn't say anything else and when her hand touches mine it feels so familiar and wonderful and I just want her to hold me and I fight the urge to ask her to hug me when she asks me again if I need her to call someone for me. She stands with me and waits as I make up my mind. The world isn't fragile nor is it vicious the way birds of prey are. The world just is and everything that happens in your life is such a weird mix or random chaos and lack of preordained bullshit it hurts to imagine that there isn't a reason for everything that happens. The woman stands there, cell phone still in her hand I wonder if she'll call someone. Will she call the police and tell them what she saw just outside a casino and I want her to disappear because women like her have been the death of me every single day of my life. Jasmine gone and I can't help but remember that first day I ever saw her and the way she smiled. This woman, whoever she is and wherever she's from, I wonder if someone out there thinks the way I think about Jasmine about her. When I was younger and bit tougher I could have thought these things about this woman. She stands there, next to me, and my brain fills with all that violence and death. I wonder what's to become of me and when I knew Jasmine would be there to put me back together, who will be there for me now. I'm a child needing someone to always put me back together whenever I fall like in that children's story and completely fall apart. I look at the woman, my eyes feeling so dry I can feel the blood vessels so engorged with my own hemoglobin that hers look alien to me. I say thank you and just continue walking. She stays there for a moment, and I know this because I look back when I'm a few feet from her to see if she was real or if I imagined her, and there she's standing looking in the direction I'm walking, shattered and destroyed. I said thank you to her and she smiled that sad, wan smile that kills me. Jasmine.

This is a long time ago and I didn't even know Jasmine existed, yet. Asleep on my couch all those years ago and I dream about a hotel and an apartment building on Desert Inn. Traffic's the usual and I'm walking from a hotel to my apartment, an apartment I always hated when she left. The sky is grey but there is no rain. and I walk and my torn jeans and that old as fuck Static-X tee-shirt and pair Chucks and I'm walking and I'm happy because I imagine her being so pretty because, well, she always is. And I walk and the street isn't maddening and I walk into the complex and go to the mailbox and get a postcard that's actually photograph of Jason and Kati from when they were in Canada. I always imagine her smile when I look at Kati's because they both have it, that smile. In my apartment, smoking cigarettes and I'm drinking beer and watching television. The dream's nothing but banality. She walks in my apartment and she's got tears in her eyes and I ask what's wrong and she tells me, basically, some old woman at the rental office gave her shit about 'belonging here,' something racist, she says, and all she could think of was get here and she didn't even get mad. She was more hurt than anything else. She says she couldn't even think of anything to say in comeback. She was so surprised she couldn't think of anything, she became frightened and ran up here and now, she says, she hates herself for doing that. She's not the type of person to do this, she says and she's not really crying but you just know she hates herself at this very moment and I try to console her and she says thanks, that she will be fine but you know she's still upset and I say fuck that old cunt and I leave her there, in my apartment and tell her to have a drink and she smiles that sad, wan smile that kills me. I leave my apartment got to the rental office and I see Shari and I'd always thought she could have been pretty in the earlier years of her life but now she looks like that old pair of leather shoes you see every now and then in your closet. I see her when I walk in and she looks up from her People magazine and smiles that cookie-cutter smile she gives everyone and asks me how I'm doing and I don't say a thing until I get so close to her face, I'm hovering over her desk, looking at her face, wrinkled and that faint smell of pot lingering from her pores and she doesn't pull back but you see it in her eyes that she's frightened and stunned and I think back to her with the tears in her eyes up in my apartment, alone, and I tell Shari, without a pause, if you hurt her again, I will murder you. I walk out and I wake up to the sound of my cell phone ringing and it's her, not Shari.

Sahara's horrible to me: there's people all over and I wonder why. Tourists are like viruses and I want them all to die when I say words. Like in that book I read so long ago, I want to utter something like a prayer, like a spell, really, and all these people just up and die. That's just like heaven.

Derek and I are in the mall, shopping for his sister for their fourth birthday and I'm holding his hand. I always hold his hand when in such crowded places mostly because my father never did. No one ever said you shouldn't. If someone ever did, I'd break their nose. Derek's so excited because he has money to buy Araya a present he chose. He wants to go to the toy store and to that girl's clothes store his mom pointed out to me during Christmas last year. He wants to buy Araya one of those pink tee-shirts, one of those that has a picture of that cartoon with the little horses that talk when they watch cartoons on Sunday mornings. Araya really loves little puppies and wants to get her that lunch box he just saw at Target. He wants to pick out his own card to his sister. Derek and Araya amaze me with how smart they are. That book by Tim Burton his mother reads to them every night, he wants to get Araya one for herself so she can read it whenever she wants. Derek also wants to get her The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish. Derek says he wants ice cream but wants to take Araya a huge cone when we go home. My older brother told me once how, really, girls look at you differently when you're out somewhere with your kids. I never really believed him and just thought it was one of those false memories that watching too much television puts in your head. Derek's loud and so enthusiastic in that black tee shirt his mom got him last month and in his khaki shorts and miniature Chuck Taylor's. All over are those girls from up the street, from the university, walking about in their tiny shirts and near transparent jeans just smiling at me as Derek and I walk by. Derek really doesn't call me daddy and I'm glad because I hate that fucking word. He calls me Jay for some reason and that's fine with me. I call him D. Derek and I walking through the mall and we're heading into that new toy store at the end of the Boulevard Mall next but he doesn't know this yet. He's so excited to be turning four next week he really wants his sister to have such fun. He's not thinking about himself but I'm sure that will change. Jasmine and Araya are at the Galleria buying him a present. Jasmine's mom sent them both one hundred dollars for their birthday only she confused April with May and sent the kids their birthday present too early. Half of each of their presents went into their new bank account and now we're trawling the mall, Jasmine with Araya, me with Derek. I hate the mall but this is where Derek wanted to come. Araya only copied him, but he was ok with that only he didn't know. Jasmine and I are in contact via text messages. The four of us are going to have lunch at Jasmine's friend's house. Amy has two kids, one ten, the other five, and we love Amy because she's been Jasmine's best friend for so long, Jasmine says Amy's like a sister to her. Amy and Jasmine, they used to hate each other. Derek pulls at my hand when we almost walk past the toy store and he sees that big pink display of girls' toys in the front of one of the aisles and sees that lunch box we saw before and wants to go that way. Please, Jay, Derek says. Jasmine sends me another text message and says she loves me. We go into the toy store.

Cigarette smoke at the red light at the corner, at the crosswalk and I look around and breathe in the second hand beauty of it. I look around and there are five other people waiting for that red hand to give way to the green guy. I look around and everyone is smoking. For a moment, it looks like it could be a parade. These five people could all be part of that same church or cult or insane asylum because, really, what's the difference? They're all smoking and they're all wearing black eyeliner and the light is taking forever to change and they're all looking at me and they're all wearing black clothes; it must be at least one-ten outside today. There's three girls and two boys and they look like they're all of ten. Maybe eighteen. An adult doesn't become one with age, this little is all I've ever learned in my life. Little punk rock kids, still up and about like the nineteen-seventies never died. Fuckers, idiots. Choosing to repeat what's happened before. Kids whose parents weren't even born in the seventies, thinking because they get the music but nothing else. It's a false sense of history but they only see it as clothes and style and some kind of identity. These kids probably feel they were born at the wrong time because the scene they're in. I want to have the strength and the venom necessary to tear off their arms and beat them to death with them. All in their beat-to-death clothes. Leather and tight black jeans and their white Doc Martens. That tee shirt that the very pretty pale white girl with bright red lipstick is wearing is a Misfits tee shirt no one but Hot Topic even produces anymore; no one should. But she smiles at me with an approving smile. I melt inside. And I remember reading the novel Underworld almost twenty years ago and not understanding everything about the layers of human history and the interconnectedness of us all with things that matter very little in the grand scheme of the universe; in the novel it's baseball, here, right now, it's music and wannabes. The pretty girl smiles at me and I feel self-conscious enough to look down and see myself completely destroyed, in and out. Everything I know and everything I've ever wanted is long gone, hours into the past, victims in the desert and until this very moment I didn't think there'd be anything else that would actually give me something as optimistic. I say it to myself, the light changing and the four of them and the pretty girl walk across and I say it to myself: hope?

The world really is vicious in its intent sometimes.

Stranger things had happened to me before and I remember that meeting and it was nothing more than mere minutes, that's all it took. Still in college and just coming off an intense high and I drive out to Venice. Venice in spring and California's the place, you know. My head still running in circles but only small ones when I park my truck somewhere off the mall and I grab my book bag and head toward that annex to Book Soup that opened there last year, just off Lincoln. I walk in and breathe it all in, the dust and what I always thought was something that came close to magic. Geek, me. And I walk through the aisles stacked high with books. People in here all the time, every time I come in and there's that one girl who always makes conversation with me, even when we're not talking about books and I don't buy a thing. I walk to where all the new fiction's laid out on a table and the wall it's against. There's all those books with their covers and the little blurbs just below the author's name. Used to be, for a long this is what I thought would make me happy, to see my name on one of these paperbacks and someone like me would look down and think the same thing. Illusions of youth and all that. Literally, hours pass and the books in my hand are nothing but reprints of shit from hundreds of years ago. Paperbacks. Nothing particularly interesting and I fall in love for those first ten seconds I see her. In the next twenty, he's handsome and pretty and nice-looking. More so than I think I am. He walks in with some kind of attitude, five o'clock shadow, piercing brown eyes, dark complexion, but a bit shorter than I am: he walks to her and puts his hand on her back and leans in and looks at the book that's in her hands. All of this is nothing but an air raid in my heart. My heart is broken glass and crushed flowers and destroyed cities. My heart is Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Then he lets go of her and he's off to the non-fiction section. All she's doing is looking through an anthology of Amy Hempel stories. There's that sense of gravity you feel toward another person and I feel myself moving in her direction but keenly aware of where he is, am I in his line of vision. All those years ago and I'm standing next to her as she looks through the book and I pretend to pick up the same book and begin reading, pretending, and look at her without moving my head and I wonder what she's thinking right now, will she get the book, is she enjoying it now. I wonder if she wants to ask me what I think of Hempel's writing even though I've never read anything by her but I will lie because I want that moment that never comes to last for as long as it is humanly possible. The memory is edged in my brain like an embossing. Standing there and I forget myself and I'm looking directly at her, to my left, the book in her hands and I wonder why she has those kind of eyes that make me think about just stopping someone who walks by me, when I fall in love instantaneously, and kissing them. I'm looking at her, amongst the closest thing I ever believed to be magic, and her eyes are on me and she's smiling and says hi. I say hi and I die a little less inside. The memory of someone whose name I never got and it's that kind of photograph you look at and absorb every detail of it: her short brown hair and the way it curled a bit at the edges and her blue tee-shirt that complemented her curves and the blue jeans and the Chucks and the way you saw that there was the promise of tattoos peeking from the short sleeves. I never ever saw her again even though I returned a lot to the annex at the same time every week for a long time. She never walked in, and I never saw her again. And even now, I think about this woman whom I fell in love with. I think about her a lot because, maybe, back then it was the very first time that I felt it. Maybe it was the very first time that I didn't feel anything but hope. Who knows. It hardly matters now. But still, I think of her and I hate myself for never asking her name. Hope.

And I see that final intersection and it looks so far away even thought it's maybe one hundred yards away. My thighs feel like they'll burst from exhaustion and I want a cigarette like I want to lay down and sleep for the rest of my life. I look at the cars in the distance and begin to imagine how easily taking my own breath away would have been the easiest thing to do because I wonder how people go on, how have people gone on with lives after this. What is it that makes us stronger from it all. My feet are leather and I feel tears come when I think of the only certainty in my entire life up until now, and it's close by.

There becomes something in you when you have to do things that amaze even you. You surprise yourself in ways you didn't think you ever could. It's usually something, a situation that you find yourself in ' and in most cases, you're in a real fucked up situation because of something else you did or didn't do ' and all you can do is stretch yourself your utmost. There's anything else I can think of is, well, death and becoming something after that and I find myself here. Everywhere I've ever been, the people I've met, the things I've done and it all leads me to is death. That's the one thing we all have in common and when the earth swallows you whole, that's all we all become: nothing but ash. What is it that drives you and me and everyone else to muddle their way through life when you realize that no matter how hurtful or great your life is, where you end up is nowhere and your brain stops working. We all die and this is something no one can ever escape. What is it that makes you live when you know in the end, it all means nothing? What it is, she taught me and she never even knew it.

Winter weather is horrible in the desert because of the bitter cold and the utter lack of personality of this weather, even as it's changing from summer to fall. Sitting outside because we just do and we're talking. This is all and the cold is killing me and working on the book's simply come to such a standstill and I wonder how is it that I've become stuck here but not: the time you find yourself in situations you didn't plan on, they're not always bad, quite the contrary. And we sit and talk and we're holding cigarettes against the freezing wind that comes from the west and she makes a joke about that I can't recall now. The eyes are what's keeping my head out of focus really. They're so pretty and when she smiles she closes them a bit and I wonder if she knows. It was only days ago that we shared all those drinks until four in the morning and I'm amazed she's still here. Then, she said everything she needed to say. Then, I thought things would end there. They didn't, obviously, and now, I think, things are going downhill. Drinking coffee that's barely tepid now. We sit and talk and talk and talk. We were sitting inside, in the corner of the coffee shop, still talking about things that had nothing much to do with anything other than her and her history, and me and mine. Weird how you tell people your history when you feel those vestiges of love creep up. No one will ever know, ever, is what kills me already. Talk about lives lost and attempts at taking my own and weirdly, it's like I'm talking to my reflection in a mirror. No, not a mirror, but a chrome surface. And we sit and talk. It's the juxtaposition of what happened then, a week ago, really, and now, after everything's become that sky-like obvious, I wonder, why is she here? Is it because something enthralls her about me? Arrogant, me. But this is the first time. A cold, cold evening in December, all those years ago and Golden and I, all we're doing again is nothing but talking. That's all. And it was outside, the light coming up from the Luxor and the cold and the smell of her hand cream and the way she laughed and the way her voice sounded and how everything about her at that very moment all those years ago, including the way she moved, that made me think if this was the beginning of all that'�of all that would never come.

The houses that surround me, this entire neighborhood, is old in that way you can imagine in the past, the far-distant past, there were children pedaling their bicycles along the street. The trees that look a bit over-grown but still retain a sort of permanence and nobility. The houses now look dilapidated from one block to the next but there's hardly any traffic like in most respectable neighborhoods anywhere and this is a good thing but I can't think of why right now. I feel my heart pounding like Vulcan might have a sword he made. My body's completely drained of all its adrenaline and vitamin C. I feel the weight of experience and I wonder whatever that comes next, what will I do. I want to scream in frustration and sadness and the imagine of Jasmine and Derek and Araya as they walk hand in hand off into that sunset people want to believe is heaven begins to burn itself into my mind. Think saving a file to that hardrive. I would kill the next person who denies me a cigarette. I walk through the street, there are no people out and it's such a nice, albeit, hot day. Beach weather all around me and I remember how much I like summers in Los Angeles. Walk up, north, whatever street this is and I wonder who else, in all of this universe, is also walking in the same direction. All over the galaxy, does everyone have the same type of compass we do? I walk and I want to stop but I am just close enough that I can't. My body could be burning my skeleton away for energy and I don't think I'd care, as long as it's sufficient to get me there. My mind flashes briefly to that story, written ten years ago, and who knew then I'd be living it. Foretelling someone else's future's for beginners; your own, however, is expertise, really. The cars parked out are dirty and some have that air of abandonment. Someone cares for these but barely. I walk and the fences are either white, picket ones or steel wire. There's the cars parked in driveways that are up, off the concrete and on cinder blocks, and when I walk past that white house, I see in that big front window, that the curtains move as someone glances out at the strange, destroyed-looking man walking by. What do these people think, I wonder, when they see me: I'm a walking jet plane crash. But the hope keeps me moving because I feel like I need to be saved. I need to be saved from my own murderous imaginings. I need to be saved, I have to be. I know I will never be able to. When all feels lost and everything's rearranged in my head in that toxic way, I know I need to be held and told that I will be ok. It's not that same futile comfort when you get and F in school or when you father yells at you. I need to be told that there are things out there that are bigger than me. I miss Jasmine and the kids so much I feel like I will never be whole. There's nothing left and still, I walk. Almost eighteen miles and I find my footing along the hot asphalt of the middle of the street. I walk along that invisible line that divides the two lanes of Tenth Street. I want to learn that there's more for me tomorrow and I can't believe I'm even thinking there is. There always is, but I can't get my brain to work that way. I want the world and I got it and not it's all been taken away and I feel like I need to end. I need to die, I have'�but no. I want something else now. I don't want closure to ever come because that would mean my family's forfeit and that will never be and I will never lose it. I walk past St. Louis Avenue as it perpendiculars itself with Tenth. I walk and I see the way Araya would talk back to me and I miss it. Derek ' D ' and Jasmine. My dead family. Everyone else, the rest of my family, so fractured and dead in more metaphysical ways. Everyone else has become such ghosts in my life, who wants to stir up ghosts everywhere you see. I used to think everyone around me mattered and it's right now, right here and now, that I know Patrick Bateman was right, our lives are 'not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.'� What a folly I used to believe and all I do is just keep walking. Destination unknown is nothing but a bad song.

Stay home and I try to watch movies on DVD. It's been hours and I've tried to watch three movies, all good, but my head's all over the place because who knew they'd get on so well, right? Kids off to kindergarten and I still feel the pang of loneliness and the school believed each was five. Derek and Araya, barely four, and they're the brightest kids in the universe. I feel lonely and scared: the children gone, Jasmine out to lunch and that's what frightens me. Who knew, really? After the last futile attempt at watching movies ends, I drink a beer and settle in the couch and I can't only imagine what their conversation's like. Turn on the television and it's hardly ever off the same channel. Call it my comfort animal, television. My head's always crawling with worms when I get nervous and anxious, like when you're a kid and you're waiting in the dentist's waiting room because you only imagine terrible things behind closed doors and no one can help you. Television's on to a news channel and there's the story of a grown man who ran off with someone's teenage daughter. It's every day that something like this happens and all I can think about is not how these stupid girls always fall for the ugly basketball coach. I don't think very much about the way these men all over this country feel they need to be such disgusting creatures. And I always don't think about how I tend to blame anything on the parents. Huh. Our house isn't in a part of town you'd necessarily call nice. It's the part of town most people would say has personality when all they mean is they're too polite to tell you you need to move because, well, that house at the corner, just up the street, they sell drugs out of it. Right now I feel like I could tear this house apart, I'm this nervous. I always am when Jasmine and Golden are out to lunch. Long time ago, Jasmine said she was a bit apprehensive about meeting any of my friends only because I always talk about them like they're not people. She said, then, how much she hoped they'd like her. Of course they all do. And if you're looking for acceptance through your friends, well, you're an idiot, really. But, because I am an idiot, aside from everyone in my family, the one person I always thought would always tell me everything I always needed to hear was Golden. Because once when we first met, Golden says to me when I have a girlfriend, if she doesn't like her, than she's seriously going to have to think about our friendship and if it can last. She was joking of course. Years later and there's a party at Golden's and I invite Jasmine and we go and we have an awesome time. This was one of the first times we ever hung out and it got to the point where I would lay down at night and ask myself those questions about Jasmine: does she really like me? Does she think about me the way I do about her? Are we together the way people are sometimes? Stupid boy questions. So we go to this party and Jasmine shares a joint with someone she knows who's at the party and I walk outside for a cigarette and I'm nervous because that joke from so long ago spools through my head and I want to know how it will go, what will Golden tell me tomorrow morning about tonight. More stupid boy shit. Cigarette's gone and have another and another and when the fifth one's gone, I walk inside. The living room and its red walls seem to glow because of the dim light and on the far edge of the leather couch are Jasmine and Golden, talking. I hadn't even introduced them. Talking and laughing and both with a bottle of beer in hand and I'm thirty years old but that boy inside of me smiles. Now, I wonder, what do they talk about? They're not the best of friends and they rarely call each other up. Neither's ever had much time for other girls in anyway, so why them two, right now, why are they off somewhere in the city sharing the same table? I wonder, does Jasmine say how much she loves me? Does she say all those nice things she says she tells her mother? I wonder if she's telling Golden right now whether or not I am really a bastard who never bothers to pick up toilet paper when shopping? But most of all, I'm afraid that there will be something Golden sees in Jasmine that she doesn't like. It was a joke all those years ago. Television's on and now I imagine Golden telling Jasmine what she learned about me way back then. Things that Jasmine knows half the story of. It isn't lying, really, if you omit certain things, right? I wonder, why is it that these two women together right now is what's frightening me? And I just know that when she gets home, like always, Jasmine won't say a thing when I ask her how was everything, how's Golden doing, where did you guys go, what did you do. And neither will Golden when I talk to her next because apparently, in my head, this is the one thing I know for certain: they agreed to never say anything to me and more anxiety builds sometimes. All the time. These two women feel like the end of me and it's time to go pick up the kids.

I sit on the edge of the sidewalk because I'm afraid to even go up to the door and ring the doorbell and what do I say. My head, bruised and scarred and covered in some blood. My clothes are simple disasters. My entire body, inside and out, is nothing anymore. My hands are shaking and the sun's slowly coming down into the west and there's the barely visible stars already showing up everywhere. And I begin to feel that the end is close. Everywhere I look anymore I don't see the end of me. That's such a far away and distant memory that I can't even believe I had it to begin with. But how would you go on? What if everything you ever cared about is ripped from you. And inside I feel a swelling. My heart's going to explode. I know once this is done so am I. I don't want to be but there isn't anything else that's keeping me here. Every step here, every mile I end, now I realize I was inching closer to that death. That very final death. The one thing we all have in common at one point or another in life is death. The realization hits: my body was only meant to last me until this point. Like, suddenly, I know I'm some kind of live poltergeist and once I'm done, I will cease to be. How could I not know this back when my face was on the desert floor? Now, it's like someone's reading to me the instructions for what's going to happen next. There's usually that one thing that keeps you going until your body and your mind know it's time to go. My mother always used to say it was us, her children. My father used to say it was my mother that always kept him going, even after she was gone, and now I think he only lasted that long without her because his flesh was stronger than most people's. Sitting on the sidewalk and I'm that frightened puppy because I want all of this to end and I don't. I've seen three oceans in my life and the radioactive desert in California. I've flown to three continents and I've opened my eyes to see my children lying next to me. I've seen the moon when it runs red with all those chemicals in the atmosphere and I've known what the perfect kiss feels like. I've been the saddest anyone can ever be and I've been the happiest. I want to let go because as I feel I've seen all that the universe has for me, there's something that I know I'm missing from seeing or doing or experiencing. This is bullshit of course. The sun's slowly growing darker and I want this all to end and I know how I can. There's the one thing, you know, waiting to be done and I want to get it over with. I just want that moment to last forever, to be totally ingrained into my mind that when I finally die, I will die with at least one happy thought running through my synapses. And I'm afraid to let go. But I shouldn't be. It's like somebody whispering into my soul that I will be much happier and content. My life'�my life is done after this and suddenly I'm filled with a huge sense of accomplishment. A lot of people, they don't get this and wind up dying from old stupid age with all those things in their head they'd wished they'd said or done or seen or tasted or heard. I'd rather go this way, I think. The sun turning the sky orange in the west and I stand and I turn and I face the front door of the house and I remember it all suddenly and why here I am, right now, at the very end.

The house remains where I knew it would back then, way back in the last decade and if you asked me why back here, back to where it almost all began, I couldn't tell you with an ounce of sincerity. I don't know why I knew that then: Jennifer and I are drinking and talking about these people we don't know and, for me, it's that red on the living room walls that gets me. Jennifer doesn't know this and I never tell anyone. Years later I would say something to my older brother, when talking about not Jennifer, and try to instigate a kind of lower-class living. I wasn't, of course referring to her. It was always him, whom she wound up with. I always hated him for no reason than he was first. Luck of the draw as I imagine the red walls of the house. And I always, after I found out about him, I would always think about why it wasn't me first, like someone decided how things should've been. But you grow out of it all, you know, with time and still, I knew then I'd be here now. This isn't a revelation. Everyone knows. The lost art of keeping my mouth shut never came until Jasmine. Because I will always love Jasmine. I cannot imagine what my life would've been without her. And every morning that I woke up next to her and she lay there with her eyes closed, breathing slowly, and I'd watch her eyes move beneath her eyelids, I fell in love with her all over again. The way her hair was a jagged mess every morning before she ever thought about jumping in the shower or running a brush through it, I couldn't imagine myself being with someone else. Every single day that went by that she touched my face with her hand in that way most people brush away fallen eyelashes from their cheek with, Jasmine became more and more that perpetual memento of everything wonderful in the universe. More and more when she said she loved me, my love multiplied a thousand-fold. I will never ever forget her. Here, at the end, the door before me could be Gibraltar because it feels like such a daunting task and all I keep thinking right now is the red walls on the other side. Should I feel guilty? Probably not. But there is that nagging thought in the back of my throat that says without saying that maybe this really is some kind of betrayal. This is the end of me and this is where I find myself. And the betrayal is, yes, I love Jasmine, but I knew all those years ago, I knew without knowing, that this is where I would be.

The image is always that pretty smile that I saw way back when. Was I really just twenty-seven? 2003 and everyone was drinking and dancing and talking and doing whatever drugs they felt necessary. This was my youth and I never really thought I was squandering it until I saw her for the very first time in that coffee shop where I would wind up working for years and years until that break came and the screenplay sold. All those years ago and I still remember like it was today. The first thing was shaking hands, that hand cream scent of hers I always remember. It feels like it was tomorrow when I first met her but it wasn't. I remember.

Imagine someone telling you this will be the last thing you will ever do, so make it count.

The image of me crawling through the desert becomes nothing but that scar across your face.

The way you thought you would end isn't this but right now it's the only way it should be.

You know you should've not made it out of that car crash.

Do things really happen for a reason, is there really something behind my having lived just this long enough that I know what comes next will only be for a moment but I will take it with me to that unknowable infinity and that's ok? I'm strangely relaxed by this idea that this is the end and why I am here isn't such a big mystery. The mystery:

The big fat fucking secret is that everything you ever felt you had to do in life, everything that you actually accomplish, you earn time. It has nothing to do with good or bad, it's about getting things done. Hell, some people could think what they have to do before they die is stomp kittens to death all day long. But everyone has a list of things somewhere in their mind and once all these things are done, there really isn't any other need for you to be here, is there? A lot of us, we get there somehow and through different circumstances. And not all of us will get there, be sure of that. But what's being whispered in my ear right now is that I actually became one of those who managed to complete nearly everything that I ever wanted to do and I'm very surprised going to Japan really wasn't one these things. But, the universe has decided that I did if only for this one last thing. Like I said, not really such a big fucking mystery. Secret of life and all that. Kind of a let down, if you think about it...just not for too long. Weird knowing this all of a sudden.

When I knock on the door, I'm apprehensive and I wonder, what does one say to anyone else at times like these? I knock again, and I hear the dogs barking inside. His and hers dogs, you know. And the red wall I want to see, it really is nothing but a wall painted red and there used to be a canvas hanging from it, and now I wonder if it's still there. I've not been in this house in so long and I remember the way this house always felt like a home. Almost always. I hear footsteps on the wood floor, getting closer to the door. My heart's a little woodpecker trying to escape. I hear her telling the boys ' the dogs ' to calm down. All these years gone by and it's not really a surprise whom you know will be there, when it's all done. Most people don't get to choose.

The future's such a wasted promise.

All those songs you ever hear that you just know you want played when you die aren't necessary and she opens the door and she stands there, like that mental photograph I have of her: blue jeans but no shoes on, those little pink socks I really like her wearing but I never tell her; that tee-shirt with the red print on it, the name of a band I don't know and probably hate; all those little black plastic bracelets, dozens of them on both wrists. She opens the door and there she is and I'm standing there and I see her and she sees me and her smile fades away, just like that. I feel my face get hot and I fall to my knees. The night is going to be glorious.

What I come to realize too late was that I was always afraid of her, you know. I was always afraid to fully be who I thought I was at the time. And at the same time, I don't think I was ever more me than I had ever been in my life. And it wasn't the fact she was there when I needed someone to be there for me the most. It wasn't that she's saved me more times than anyone should. I always wanted to be the person I always thought I wanted to be. But I was always afraid because I always thought that there really is too much you can know about a person and I was always afraid of saying or doing something that would make her think less of me. Up until Golden, my mother was the only person I worried about and what she thought about me. Because for a long time I always thought of myself as that hopeless case, you know, the one person in anyone's life who really could not come back from being the usual waste of skin. I was afraid that if I was ever that truthful with her, she would hate me. I worried that everything that I thought, even after Jasmine, would be some kind of flaw. I always wanted to be perfect for her and I hated myself when I knew I could never, ever be.

She asks me what's wrong, what happened to me. I look at her and the way her brow creases. She asks me if I'm ok and I look at her and the way her arm extends to me in that universal gesture. She asks me, 'Javi, what happened?'�

The sun is bright in my dreams and everything's so clean and white and awfully sterile. And she's still wearing that tee-shirt with the red lettering and the jeans and the pink socks. These are the dreams of a fool.

Like there's Lucifer Morningstar standing next to me, whispering those things that everyone wants to hear and this time, with me, it's really what I need to hear.

She stands there and holds her hands to her face. How I must look. I'm such a terrible disaster and here I am, showing up at her house, their dogs running about like loveable children. This is me, in that way everyone should be, defenseless and totally in need. Humility, and all that. There's that lack of forethought to this and she's standing there. Some music's playing from inside her house and the sun's gone now and the stars are all out now and I wonder what else is necessary but nothing is. Right now is the most important place in the universe. She asks me again what happened and she doesn't get closer to me. And I tell her'�

There's always that feeling that you're missing something. Everyday you wake up and go on with your life and there's always that sense that something's so out of place.

And I tell her and her hands come up to her mouth, as if to hold that cry inside. Her eyes are filled when I finish telling her and she stands there, shuddering like people do when they're cold. She stands there, that dream image ripped from my brain. I finish telling her and the silence between us always becomes something welcomed because the way life works out sometimes is this, this pseudo-perfection and people just never pay attention when it happens. My entire family gone and I tell her. She always loved when Derek came to her house and how he and her dog, Buddy, would play in her back yard. She said she'd love to watch Araya whenever we needed her to, Araya and Derek. Araya and D always called her auntie Golden. Christmas last year and they're over at our house and the kids are asleep and Jasmine and Golden's husband are watching the movie on television and Golden and I are outside, on the front porch, smoking, and we're so quiet and the cold is nice for once in Las Vegas and she says to me, I love you, Javi. I say, me too and we finish our cigarettes and go back inside and the movie's all but over and Jasmine's gone to bed and Golden's husband's already snoring on the couch and we sit at the dining table and have a beer and talk until the sun breaks in through the windows facing east.

The futility of it all comes to you, in the end. And this is what the end is. She's standing there, me on my knees, and she kneels over and wraps her arms around me and says how sorry she is all over and over. I kneel there, in her arms, and I feel my soul leaving me, I feel a piece of me, something important becoming that transparent that no one will ever know I was ever here. I want to tell her thank you for always being the one thing in my life that was always ever there for me; even the sky betrays you. I want to say how much the last ten, twelve years have meant to me, but the universe won't let me speak. In her arms and I feel her hair against my face. Me there, her arms around me, she's crying, and I wonder how I came to this. Everything doesn't happen for a reason, but at times like this I just want to believe in fate, that way. She's crying and I cannot recall a time in my life when she wasn't part of it. From inside her house, I hear music and the laughter of Araya's and Derek's cousins. Buddy sniffing at us as we kneel there, at her doorstep and this is the end. And there's so much more than I can keep track of that I know she needs to know and this is the end. I feel like sleeping. For a very long time.

And in her arms I melt and my face is nothing but a river and I cry and all she does is hold me gently and all I smell is her apple-scented hand cream.

Now, I'm done.

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