Slim Kim. The mystery of her long strides. Leaves in her hair. Once she slept on the floor with Mudboy instead of on the bed with me because I was such a smart-ass and when was I ever going to grow up and stop being so cynical? I never felt so alone as on that mattress by myself.

Growing up made me more cynical, like it does to most people. I keep waiting for the reconciliation of the unfinished. It’s like if somebody writes you a note on a tiny piece of paper and rolls it very, very tight. Then she puts a pinhole in an egg and blows all the egg out. Then she puts that tight stick of paper into the pinhole and she says it’s a message for you someday when she’s gone. And then she’s gone and nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about when you ask if anyone found an egg in her room, her family wondering, who the hell are you? So you never find out. The idea of the egg lasts forever, this little oval hollow in your heart. You get married, you have your own kids, your hair turns a distinguished gray, and you never become your father’s boss. But you never sleep down by the river, any river, ever again, in a red-and-blue double sleeping bag.

When I graduated, I gave Mudboy away — Charles took him, and he spent the rest of his life in a safe, fenced-in yard in Warren, Michigan. I hadn’t taken very good care of him — that’s probably obvious by now. He’d become a burden, chewing up my books and records, alone in the house I shared while he waited for me to return from chewing up things myself, from being a jerk, assuming there was always time to rewrite the paper, get a better grade. Maybe I should have tried hugging trees first before driving out to Millvale and taking him from a dry barn and into a rainy afternoon after whatshername dumped me. Mudboy had been an impulsive mistake — one of my consistent weak spots, those impulses. Charles was wrong about thinking. Stopping to think things over was something I did learn. But I was a slow learner. I was a slow dreamer.

I should have been held back.