help_is_on_the_way raze middle age grants you the gift of assisted flight. it comes at a cost. your homemade airship might afford you a freedom you've never known outside a dream, but it won't stand up to the beating living gives it. a man who doesn't have a name trusts the autopilot to see him through while he sleeps. he wakes up in a field far from home, uninjured but saddled with a vehicle that's let him down. a few friendly strangers offer assistance. outside a bland office building, a woman tries to talk him into coming inside. she suggests counseling. there's something about her he doesn't trust. he knows if he walks through that door it's a one-way trip. he wanders away from her, into the downtown core. he has no money. no way of contacting his family back home. nowhere to stay. he doesn't even know where he is. night comes on like an unwanted kiss. he passes three kids playing some invented game with a baseball in the middle of a street he might have lived on in another life. he doesn't try to make allies out of them. it just happens. they bring him to the bedroom they share. it belongs to no earthly house or apartment. it's a room apart from the rest of the world. they listen to records. he's old enough to be their father. it feels awkward. he says he'll leave if they want him to. "no," one of the boys says. "we like you. you listen. you don't make everything about you." a different boy is trying to get over the end of his first real relationship. "breakups are hard," the man says. "they don't get any easier when you get older. but time helps. slowly, you think less about the good times. so it doesn't hurt as much. you start to see things as they really were." the boy cries and thanks him. he hugs him like i guess he'd hug his dad if he had one. the man makes it home somehow. he has a box of gifts delivered to his friends, carried by a drone. instead of writing them a letter, he films himself speaking with a small black handheld device that isn't a phone or a television. he gives that to them too. he smiles through the screen and says he misses them. he says he'll never forget them. seeing him again means more to them than any object could. at the top of the pile of presents is a new catcher's mitt. when i tell you this story, i call the bedroom a cave and compare the man to david paymer, though the person he really looks like is an addict who laughed at a heat map showing the damage he'd done to his brain in a documentary i saw a million years ago. we live together in the house i spent a few childhood summers trying to hide in. i keep track of a train's tuneless whine in a small spiral notebook. whenever i hear it hiss at me, i write down the time. we cross paths in the dining room. you ask me how i'm doing and answer the question yourself before i can say anything. "yesterday i was a wreck," you say. "but today i feel better." "it's the other way around for me," i say. "yesterday i felt okay. today i'm fucking heartbroken." things are ending. have ended. we're trying to work out what we are now that we aren't what we were before. i sit down at the table and try to find my place in the notes i've made. i have two notebooks now. one has blank pages in the middle. as if i couldn't decide if i wanted to start at the beginning or the end. i flip through both books. there's nothing useful in either one of them. i try the bathroom. there are two books in the bathtub. damp but undamaged. one of them is a collection of comic strips called "help is on the way". the other is a little golden book. "goodnight, little bear". beside that is the red flashlight that sleeps in my bed every night. i gather up these things and lean them against my backpack after walking past your purse. i sit back down at the table. you aren't sure how it's going to be with the two of us still sharing the same space. you think it'll help that you've got a lot of things planned to keep you busy. you think maybe i should do the same. but that isn't me. "maybe it would be better for you if i moved out," i say. "what would we look like if that happened," you say, "and we just had lunch once in a while?" you look like you want to cry. "i guess we'd look like everyone else," i say. there's a scene of us on a mattress that isn't mine. we move our bodies until i'm holding you from behind. i can see my face but not yours. you whisper something i can't hear. i know why. this memory isn't something i'm moving through. it's just a movie i'm watching, with scripted scenes standing in for what never was. 231219 what's it to you? who go blather from