A little chocolate wrapper, fluttering around the corner edge of 85th Street and Lexington, speckled with mud and fractured snowflakes, reminded me of our encounter with Harold in the summer of 2004. Remember him from your old neighborhood? He used to live with his mother and a widowed aunt who made tulip bracelets for supplementary income down the alleyway from the train tracks. When he came up to you and said, can you give me food? I haven't eaten in two days, you grabbed my hand, and let go of the lilac vase you were carrying to give to Rita before the circus. The hand-grabbing didn't mean anything. It was friendly, impulsive, and reactionary. A lot of things we did as kids didn't have double meanings or distorted motives. They were simple; heartfelt, sincere, and playfully innocent. Adulthood, on the other hand, brought in layers and layers of unnecessary complexity; things that didn't have to have meaning, things that didn't have to offend, or make anyone uncomfortable about anything.
But you grabbed my hand, as a reflux, perhaps, and while the vase shattered into pieces, you took out a chocolate bar and gave it to him. He cried, took the chocolate bar and ran away --dropping the wrapper by a driveway. Three days later, he died in a car accident. I lay a tube rose at our meeting spot. It made the news.
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