I felt really guilty about it at the time, but not so much anymore.

I didn’t realize that one of the most significant people in my life had already split.

Was already tied up with someone else.

If I had known that, I might not have been so reluctant when a beautiful, drunk, young woman began making out with me in the middle of one of the shittiest raves I had ever attended.

It’s impossible for me to deny the fact that those brief moments between the two of us were probably the best kissing experience of my life.

Maybe that says something about me. Maybe that says something about her.

Maybe it says something about the moment.

People desire to be loved.

They go about fulfilling those desires in whatever ways seem most reasonable to them.

At the time.

Under the circumstances.

Later wishing they could take it back.

Wishing they could have seized the opportunity.

Crying for three seconds as they ride down ten floors.

Screaming incoherently from the floor in the hallway.

Raging against the void.

Solidifying, resolving, into themselves.

Learning how to love.

The day of my sister’s wedding—the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima—was extremely emotional for me.

I knew it would be, and very seriously considered grinding its edge off with some prescription painkillers before leaving the house that morning.

But fuck it.

This was only going to happen once. Regardless of how awkward and overwhelmed and vulnerable I would feel, I knew I needed to feel it.

I wanted to feel it.

By the end of the ceremony, I was welling up like a baby gorilla whose mother had just been murdered. I hung around the narthex of our family’s church. Before extensive renovations, this space was the chapel proper, where my siblings and I participated in countless services and pageants together. I waited for the crowd to empty out of that once-sacred antechamber, until only the nucleus of my family remained.

My sister gathered up her dress, walked over to me, gave me a big hug, and said, “Don’t worry, brother, I’m still your sister.”

“It’s not that,” I rasped. Words did not fail me so much as my entire higher functioning was viscerally immolated by a synaptic blast wave. I don’t know how I found the ability to release what I felt.

“I’m just so happy for you.”

Hours later, my parents looked out over a gathering of hundreds of friends and relatives. To keep his composure, my dad said nothing and cast his gaze downward. Despite the obvious parallelism between the two of us on this day, this is a story I don’t know how to tell right now. Maybe it’s not even important.

“You’ll have a tendency to focus yourselves inwards,” said my mother, speaking for both herself and my dad. “But remember, the two of you are part of a community, and you should focus your love outward.”

That moment has decayed, but the shadow of those words is still and forever flashburned onto the concrete of my soul.

Several months back, I was making sandwiches in my parents’ kitchen. At the time, it was also my kitchen.

Just as my crispy beauties were coming out of the press, my dad walked in with my near-centenarian grandfather.

“Are you making some lunch?” Grandpa asked.

“Yeah,” I eeked out.

“You know how you fix that?” The patriarch asserted as though he was criticizing my craft.

“How?” I asked, not entirely sure what he was getting at, but eager to recieve a kernel of his vast wisdom.

“Get married,” he began.

I wasn’t following.

“Then you don’t have to cook your own meals,” he finished.

“You can make someone else’s meals, too,” interjected my father.

Never in my life had I been so confident that I would just prefer to eat alone.