This story ended as all decent farewells to another life should; with one hell of a party.

Tonight I celebrate a chapter well lived and my sentimentality gets the better of me: mourning moments lost. My pick strums against worn nickel-plated steel strings as I bellow notes reaching out to all the love in the room. Friendship of the fiercest order – wall to wall in my favorite dive.

Rush on – spin around – 5 a.m. has found me, drift finally into melancholy dreams to sleep. Overwhelmed, drained, flushed and hung out to dry, despite my wet cheeks.

Milwaukee fading away in the distance with Minneapolis on the horizon driving west into the sunset yet again. West, west, always west. My brain possessing two spaces at once like a glimpse at the multiverse, neither quite called home.

Nothing is ever exactly as it was try as we might. Sorcerers and gods alone may push back against time, but mortals may never go back.

January touches my dry skin, frozen, calm, the month a testimony to new beginnings in and of itself. Winter ever beautiful and longing – a time to embrace cold hands and cold hearts. Feet in both worlds but I can’t go back, yet after all this time I have come to know that that feeling is mine. A moon pulled in perpetuity of an orbit, or memory like a notion suspended in a snow globe, shaken later under an Aquarius New Moon. Linny always loved snow globes.

You can always get that feeling back, sensory premonitions looking backwards and forwards simultaneously. White flakes on my brow and wet boots and sharp pine here and there and back again.

Yet I’m crying into my Corona. I’ve never needed to be held so tightly, while I embrace the momentum that pulls me away from here. Lin’s gone, hair first grown gray with age. Joey’s gone, before his contagious smile could show in aged laugh lines crinkling against his eyes. Rage and loss mingle with hope and things I don’t yet have a name for.

Unstable, manic colors burst behind my eyes and the kaleidoscope sees only within not without. When we are young we run as fast as we can away from what we think we know, familiar spaces we itch to outgrow. Later we remember that ache in our steps which we’ve already walked and though those steps are far behind you you’ll get there again one foot in front of the other. Polarizing gravity pulling you fondly back into a snapshot of a life well lived and remembrance that blossoms into waking actions.

So wake – inhale, breathe out deeply. Worry not, when 27 closes curtains to 28.

Light a match and I’ll see you on the other side.