going up and down
April 1, 1993 02:10 PM

I didn't expect to start a tradition. But we did, in a way. We three. A sort of tradition that you'd invent feeling like your years spanned everything.

everybody's traveling on a crazy seesaw
going up down up down
so your life goes by
you're either low or high on the

Heady stuff to be seventeen and in charge. In charge of something large and dramatic. And we were newly friends, he my right hand. We were in charge together and spent the hour(s) between class and long nights lingering on art or mall, each with the same weight.

Do you remember that? Climbing stairs in those bounds of yours, you dragged me along. Remember the ugliest painting ever, mustard yellow, remarkable for its fade color and mastery of a full wall. Some relic of decades passed. We would go up and down escalators I think always touching.

I knew the inside and behind of that place. But it learned new layers. Started from a child's glimpses of sarcophagi, grew to pining over boys who might touch a hand folding a great silken streamer, and finally to us hiding from adolescent responsibilities.

It seems the two of you fought, subtly, for my praise or teaching or being the one to let that massive drape fall, or leap to send it back up. But I don't trust the memory. Except the image of him dangling from it, which I must never have seen.

All those platforms and green rust-painted railings. You balanced on anything like a frog. Had I already come to accept that you wouldn't break yourself? Anxiety bred in by an amazing ability to always fall down, always hurt somehow - had you cured me of that?

I lost it somewhere. Stopped falling over, down, wherever. I don't remember everything. But you were there, then an extension of myself.

Literally my right hand. You were stage right.