Because Truth Is Our Currency...

I was sitting here tonight, the nearing end of April. In May, I'm setting off to better lands. Faraway lands, to take care of a large handful of business with my friend, Burn. I think about him every now and again, wondering what he's up to and what he's thinking, knowing that when anything sweeping is happening or coming in his life, he starts to lose his shit and come unfolded or at least as unfolded as someone like him is as capable of being. I don't know if he would want me to post something like this, but I feel like it's necessary, because if he's only sending it to me, then that's both not what he needs and not what he intends when it comes to letting himself out. Because he's my boy, because these moments must go down...

JD,

You want to know what's going on. It's late, my body is tired. It knows what's coming. All it wants is to rest and lock onto as much comfort as it can for the next 3 weeks in this town. It knows we're going to see things and feel things and experience things that will make us foreign. It knows you and me, that we will smash our pretty faces in it - to break them, to seek out the things that destroy us and build us and show us we were right to come searching.

I want to say something to you my friend, because truth is our currency, the one thing we will always get by on. I don't know what would have become of me had I never met you that night. I wouldn't want to know the person I would have become without you. I've heard you say that I've saved you before. I've read it and taken it in and always let you have those words because you said them first. This world out here...if I wasn't leaving...if we weren't going to go where we are about to go, if we weren't about to chase the things we are about to chase, I would not make it. It's maddening, fucking maddening. It's constricting and swallowing and asking me to be exactly what I'm not every day and every day and every day. These hands in my pocket, these fucking hands in my pocket always and pulling and trying to pull me in and take me on and lift me, and fucking lift me, and fucking lift me. I've forgotten how to breathe, strangled, hands on my throat as I smile and smile. I want to breathe again John. I need to get out John. I don't know what I would have done if May 15 wasn't circled. I don't know what I would have done without your push. You are the truest friend I have. I don't need to say it, anything, and you've got it. You've got it all, you got it all from that first night.

Sometimes I think of the world. I wonder how it will accept us and our perceptions of it. I wonder which one of us it will rub out first, afraid of the truths we might expose, with fire in our fists and in our breath. I can see what is waiting for us at the end of that plane ride. Buses, cars, strangers. I can see what's waiting for us when maps can no longer tell us where we are. I can see how we are going to handle what it gives us. I have no idea. I can see us begging for more, always begging for more. At some point, I thought the first book might calm me, getting it out, putting it out. I am drifting further. Further and further. I need you to drift with me now. I know that I don't even need to ask. I know that I never had to, never will. May we extend false courtesies to one another for the rest of our lives, and then trounce them wildly. May every day that passes make us unrecognizable to our former selves.

Quite soon now. Never soon enough.

Burn