This is how it ends: you win and it feels like you lost.

So you move. And you keep moving until you find a place where no one talks about much at all, in a jungly green dampness where vines can grow over you in your sleep, if you want, and people know how to disappear completely.

Every sunday you go and help his parents with odd jobs.

They have a grave for him, but no one's buried there. You take care of it, even though no one asks.

You feel like someone's watching you. You look up, and there he is, the same rumpled mess as always with his shades over his eyes and a blue scrap of a tie hanging out one pocket.

"Figures you like hanging out in the middle of fucking no where."

It's been at least two years, and maybe closer to three because you don't keep track of time, and he bangs on your door for a solid hour when you won't let him in.

When you finally give in, he pushes past you, insults your choice in furniture, and asks for a beer.

The funny thing is, you actually think about giving him one.

He smokes a lot. You think about picking up the butts but he's trying to spell his name with them, so you leave it alone.

It's hard to pin down smells. It worries you that you can't remember the way her hair smelled, except that it was like flowers. Wasn't it? Which flowers? Maybe you only think that, because that's what seems logical.

You say nothing.

"I'm not even buried there."

"He always had a tinge of electricity around him, like the air just before lightning strikes.

"I know."

"You keep digging me up," he says, as if he thinks this should mean something to you.

And you say, "I'm not."
And he says, "You do."
And you say, "So what?"
And he says, "So don't."

There is a hole inside of you that still remains in the shape of him. It has ragged edges because it was ripped away so suddenly, but there are smoother areas where you've forgotten what was originally him and what was you. The tattered edges sometimes stay still for days, but then there are other days where the wind blows sharply through. On those days, you stutter around your words, forgetting things you should know and remembering things you shouldn't.

This false entity lived free and easy, and his words fit altogether too easily on your tongue.

He is an out-of-focus picture that is sometimes sepia-tinted; he is a series of brilliant, colorful flurries of motion. He is the one swatch of memory you have that is so grim the colors won't stay and it immediately bleeds away into negative space beyond the burning edges of a photograph.

His name has been forgotten by just about everyone, but you know that he was maybe the most important person of all. Maybe he's just a minor vision in the dusty machinery of everyones minds, a blur in an overcast background, but you know otherwise.