As I made my way down into the park, somewhere, buried there beneath the deep, darkness of the night, I could hear the faint clink of glass and smell the sour stench of liquor and unwashed bodies mixing up with the thick, foresty scent of leaves and grass and dirt. I kept my bag tight in my hand, straining my eyes to see as I made my way deeper down inside of the place. There seemed to be more of them than I remembered, and I was conscious of it as I moved – the tangled stretch of a body, curled there beneath the shrubs, and the low hum of voices carried out in the breeze from a cluster of trees. I musta walked over a mile into the center, my neck rigid and tingling every time I heard a twig snap or something stir in the bushes around me. At one point I passed an entire camp of them, with a fire burning in the center and what must have been at least half a dozen of them spread out there around it, squatting alongside the pieces of trash and broken bits of furniture, smoking stub ends of cigarettes and talking in low voices laced with liquor and night and the feeling of aimless freedom I was coming to realize could only exist for people who didn’t belong to anybody or anywhere. I walked on. The deeper I went into the park, the further I seemed to go from myself. As if every step was marking my disappearance further into this thing I just couldn’t understand. The memories and the sense of where I’d come from fading away into the darkness behind me so that when I eventually did sleep that night, I woke up three times not knowing what was real anymore – whether the past as I remembered it had actually happened, or if maybe it was the park, whispering there around me, that was the actual dream. Each time it happened I bolted up in my sleeping bag and shook my head and punched my arm and tried to make myself come to again. I blinked and swore and tried to find my way back to Port Blue and my old bedroom in the garage, fishing on the pier, and the two of us driving that way in the old truck with the radio on. But each time was the same, and each time I was disappointed. I was alone there in the dark, sitting stock still with the earthy wind sweeping across my face, knowing that he was dead, and that I was as lost and as low as I’d ever been.

© Tamar Zak-Collins, 2008