obituary kerry i've been bored, bored to tears. i can't stick with one project. i need a hobby. maybe i'll learn how to crochet, make a blanket out of granny squares. 220605 ... kerry that blathe wasn't done. oh well. he said he's bored too, that we're boring people, and i was offended. speak for yourself, i said. he was strumming his guitar. i recognized the chords from "somebody's baby." my mom is probably so bored, he said. our conversations are really boring... she just tells me about the house, the dogs. the other day she only had three calls all day. she hangs out with carol, i said. (carol is the nosy neighbor on mountain street who spends her social security money on cigarettes and tastykakes, and doesn't have drywall in her house and sleeps on a poolside lounge in the living room and claims she prefers it to a couch or a bed.) she never really had friends, he said. except my friend dylan--she was friends with his mom. so he told me the story of dylan: one day in like sixth grade we were at the bus stop and dylan had a toy gun that he was swinging around. everyone wanted to see it. i asked if i could see it and he said "no!" and i was like "okayyy, what's this asshole's problem?" so i snatched it from him, and kind of pushed him but not hard. he wasn't a big guy, he was small like me. but he just crumpled to the ground! and then he started crying and ran home. and then we got on the bus and his MOM storms up the stairs and the bus driver was like "hey you can't come on here!" and his mom was screaming at me, "stop bullying my child! stop bullying dylan!" and i was like "shit, now she's going to call my mom and i'm gonna be in for it." and she did call my mom, and she was saying how she couldn't deal with this and blah blah because she's pregnant. well my mom was pregnant at the time too, with my little sister. so my mom tells her she's also pregnant and they were magically friends and she didn't care about the stuff with dylan. it turned out she was just like that, the type of woman to hop on a school bus and scream at the kids, just a hyperbolic person. mckenzie and casey were born about a month apart. weird timing. and dylan had this stepdad, daren, who was maybe 10 years younger than his mom--he was probably 30. he was young, and really beefy. kind of gross. and they were swingers. one time i went to their house and dylan's mom had just gotten some plastic surgery, she'd gotten her lips done. and they were like a cartoon--absurd, like five times the size they should've been. i was trying not to stare and she came and got right in my face and said, "did you notice anything different??" and i was like "umm... your lips?" so me and dylan were enemies at first, but then we became friends, because that's what you did in the neighborhood, you haze some kid and tease them and then after a little while you're friends. we were close for a while. then he moved, he lived in another town and i couldn't drive yet--i went to his new house maybe twice--and then we fell out of touch, since we didn't go to the same school. ** dylan's mom called him last year to say that dylan had died, he reminded me. i asked how. he said he didn't know. you didn't ask??? how are you supposed to say that to a mother who's just lost her kid? i just said i'm sorry, my condolences, or something. i dunno, say how you're sorry and ask what happened? he just shrugged and said, well i didn't ask. we can figure it out, i said. we can look online and find his obituary. when did she call you? what was his last name? where did you live again? it wasn't difficult to find dylan's obituary. there was a little page his family set up for him with some pictures and a paragraph about him, who he was, who would miss him, and since it happened during the pandemic that the service would be online. of course it didn't say how he died. below all of that were little homages and messages people had written to dylan. one was from his mom, and it was pretty incoherent and talked about spaceships and how dylan was ahead of his time. the others, all of them with the exception of one, included something along the lines of: "i'd been thinking of you, and i realized we hadn't talked in a long time so i decided to look you up online. and that's how i found out you were gone." it depressed me at first, how most of these messages were from people he hadn't seen in years, because it painted a kind of picture like he hadn't seen anyone in a long time (maybe he hadn't). but then i realized it also meant there were all these people who were thinking of him, wondering about him, or had seen him in their dreams, and felt compelled to try and find him. there was something kind of comforting in that--that a person could die but not really be dead. it's like those of us who are still here are keeping him alive by writing to him and telling the story of dylan. i, we, still don't know how he died. we probably never will. 220605 what's it to you? who go blather from