You were ageless and spoke to me as I pottied on the first toilet. Let them call you complex, let them call you ageless with your name God's Son. To me, you were very much like me, only "up there." Things between us were philosophical, complex. I told you about my forts and the irritation brought down upon me by my sister. Then I told you about the neighbor boy who locked me in his shed and wouldn't let me out until I touched his and his eight-year-old brother's penis. You were enraged. Actually, you were silent, but I took that for silent rage. When we moved, you disappeared. So quietly I didn't notice.

Your grandfather insisted I call him grandfather after he drove you to school on his motorcycle, slid in the mud of the school's driveway, turned both of you under his machine, right in front of us, we watched the whole thing. So we picked you up. "I'm your grandpa," he said. And that's what I called him as he and 'grandma' arranged macaroni & cheese on silver TV platters during the nights I visited. From watching Footloose in your one bedroom mobile home, I sensed things were more complex, but we still managed to kick off one shoe in the middle of the night, under the black sky, in between your house and grandpa's house, right in the middle of nowhere. And I always loved grandpa and his tractor, how he lifted us high in the claw as he slowly churned us down the muddy driveway, after he let me ride on the back of his motorcycle for a few minutes, making me promise I wouldn't remember, but I did, but I never said. I always wanted you to have a farm, with an apple tree and fields that stretched out past our school with its driveway and apple tree.

We fought over who lost their parents more thoroughly. You won, in that your dad disappeared and Greg + Tori grouped their desks next to you, and together you all sought out the school counselor to deal with my awkwardness. He facilitated, for sure, what with his what-do-you-think's and is-that-what-everyone-believes-about-this's, but I was given a white rabbit's foot with beads rooted to their leather-magic frame by the teacher's aide who took me on a tour of her campus and then a powwow. Plus a new dog. And life temporarily seemed more than love, more than loss or divorce or my mother's operation to never again have another child. So I lost concern for you.

You had a picture of Tom Selleck on the inside of your bedroom door, and I asked you if maybe he was too old, and you said he was hot beyond all that. We were eleven and thirteen and you told me about sex with your brother (step-brother, you amended) and your mother was an old withered blonde who didn't seem to fit your story, and I worried, and when you smoked I grabbed the cigarette from your fingers and ripped it away, snuffed it out beneath my toes. When I later smoked, I thought of you, the way you walked next to me, carrying the boom-box, Salt N' Peppa loud right down the middle of the Alaska gravel road lined by spruce trees we ignored. Then you ignored me during the school year after telling me about being adopted and sex with your brother and dad, and later you got pregnant after you moved to Seattle, and I still thought of you whenever I heard music that made sense in spite of the setting, specifically in spite of the setting. You were the first woman I longed for. The first I longed to save, too.

You played video games with me in your basement, and sat contra me on the teeter-totters. Approximately 29 days younger, we were sacrilege... you grade school, me junior high, you special ed, me - a smart shadow borrowing books from the 400lb-ish diabetic reading teacher who loved me because I loved stories more than I could maintain a cruelty towards her, or others -- barely distracted, but still distracted, we had a real truce. You were still a boy and we went to the movies together to grow like the sponge-capsule dinosaurs that become more than a factory product, supposedly, when introduced to water. I have to admit, I mostly liked fishing for dolly vardens with you, near the coastie gates, trucking down the rivers, boots too large for both of us, both of us intent. Later, we played water shadows and you rubbed my cheekbones and told me you cared. I loved you but didn't ever get too close to believing.