Grateful More for The Making Than The Memories

a poem about needing good friends and not needing proof

One Hundred Days of Gratitude. Sixteen.

Honestly, it’s the nights we can’t remember.

Or maybe more romantically poetically and accurately,

It’s the nights we don’t bother to make space for, in the attic of our brains, because the feelings of friendship and family don’t fit in- -to something as stupidly simple as time and place.

Like constellations compared to all of space.

Or maybe more traditionally expectedly scientifically,

When we mix liquor and beer and weed smoke and bad jokes and nostalgia, new games, old stories and no judgment and no fear.

Our memories aren’t so clear.

But seared into the sacred (or my mind at least) is always the making — even without the memories.

The absolute fact of friends you’ve known absolutely for so long.

Despite some years of silence and solo suffering and only sad songs, in a terrible attempt to be “true men” instead of human.

Our belief in brothers the soft necessity of honesty and almost endless loving loyalty (all of it a choice every time)

Is more than more than more than fine. More than enough.

One of the few, true, guarded treasures of mine. The vine, that keeps growing fruit. because we keep it well-watered, online, and in-person whenever and wherever we have the time. And sometimes when we don’t.

One way of looking at a painting of the future, is that someday we won’t.

But that logic only holds if you don’t know their hearts, as I do, because another interpretation, that feels more true, to me, is that we will always have the making, with or without the memories.

The innocent honest desire for camaraderie mixed with a life with those we choose to (try and) see.

One with all of you and honestly almost all of me.

Absolutely all of me grateful, thankful, and truly, just plain dumb lucky to be.