But while we sat there, the rest of the world went on outside. The whole neighborhood sat in the shade as their kids ventured to the border of the leaf cover and sprayed passing cars with water hoses. People took slow walks and stood with their arms crossed at the edge of the driveway once the sun dipped behind our house, the embers of their cigarettes like fireflies.

It was that summer while we drug dead animals out from underneath houses, chased cats, built fences and climbed up into attics with electrical wires looped through our belt buckles that we figured out something new – something like the understanding of what it is to work next to someone, to find purpose in silent toil and quiet struggle.

And, somehow that morning there was fog on the flat desert of Odessa. Birds gathered it up in their feathers and I sat there for the last time at my grandparents’ kitchen table with no vision out of the windows. I was wholly there – because I had to be.

If the future can become the present, if we can learn for once to not imagine things that don’t exist, if we can remove ourselves from the worry of a world that hasn’t ever been a reality – the future can be now.

Night might be the collection of unfocused breaths released in sleep – drawn from the echo-chamber of unconscious thought.

The first move, the one when you’re really out of the house, that’s a big one. You find yourself with the things you left behind before, now trudging along forward with them. Before, they were like deposits of yourself, little idols of permanence you used to weight your memory in the spaces of your childhood. 

You have become extraordinary, small house – for in the night, in the morning, in the twilight moment when I’m not sure I should turn on the lights – you are a conduit of living, all good and true hours happen in you.

When you arrive someplace new and it’s at night, you smell those smells of combustion and you’re tired and you’re not sure if it was worth it, this Risk, this Leaving you’ve done. But registered in your olfactory is the memory of what happens next - the new morning.

Along the edge of the large darkness pushes the first red line, come to snuff the street lights and string the cold-weather birds along their dotted-line flight toward morning places.

 I wonder if he still looks at life as hard as he once did. I wonder if it’s possible to slap our hands against the present and shout ¡Mira! on a daily basis or if we must lose the blueness, if we must lose the wonder.

There are difficult things to do and when we do them, maybe they get ahead of us and anchor themselves in the future so we can get older and move along with some bruises and see something and remember when we did this hard thing so we could come home in the evening and have something to say.

We see that slow aging in others and we're afraid to admit it. We're afraid to admit that, yes, us too - life happened to us too. We lost some of our invincibility. We lost the rubber in our bones. Somewhere along the way our tears got hot. 

Sometimes when I walk along the water I imagine myself from above, my presence a lone dot there along the edge of the mapped world. When the waves come in, I'm lost to the sea, I think. Way up above it would seem my shallow footing in the white surf was the end of me - for a time at least.

And maybe you’ve lived with this family, but never known them until now. All of the sudden, this is your responsibility as well. All of the sudden you remember losing your dog. So you become part of this family. 

I co-owned a fish tank for a year, with fish in it. We were just two guys from Texas with some tropical fish - doing our best to traverse snow drifts and decipher Midwestern accents. It was like we needed this population of strangers to help us feel home.

Keith determines the living room is the proper place to have an aquarium that could house adolescent alligators. We set it up and then deplete the water supply for Todd County by spending the next hour dumping 65 gallons into a glass container resting two inches away from our leather couch.

It is possible to begin something difficult, I believe. Many times, we try to emulate those who have the innate ability to start – to initiate. But I think it's easier to press forward when we force ourselves into a risk. When we commit to an idea already in motion – a movement underway.

In complete silence, I felt nostalgic for a time I never knew. For a mid-century place I've never been. For a people and an existence that may have existed, but not in the way I could ever understand.

In the hill country of Texas, the stars press hard against the night sky - like they're coming from behind it and the harder they press, the greater their diameter. I see faintly the icy crevice that is the Milky Way and I think of South Dakota.