Take for instance you,
Take for instance me,

Take for instance the fact that we were getting into trouble every other minute,

Like the night you thought it would be cool to throw a chocolate bar into a hotel swimming pool, than point at it and yell
"Shit!"
You said it was something you saw in a movie,

No surprise everyone in that pool was out, instantly.
And we accepted our lifetime ban from that hotel like men,

Then rolled across town and checked into another,

Where you proceeded to seduce a single mother who was away on a business trip. Despite your best efforts later that day she snubbed you, and accepted it like forced retirement.

Take for instance the day we spent the night like millionaires, needing to go bankrupted by sunrise.

Take for instance the lies we told our parents, like, "No, that is not my sheet of LSD. I'm holding it for a friend."

Take for instance the time you told me a heart can't break. It can only bend.

Take for instance you,
Take for instance me,
Take for instance the word instantly.
And how it used to be used to define things life mashed potatoes, or coffee. But now somehow they use it to sum up your life telling me that you died, instantly.

They said it as if there was a measure of comfort to be found in the fact that you are dead.

That you said no long goodbyes or last words just gone.
Like a deadbeat dad who popped out for some cigarettes and didn't come back.

Fact is you were a different kind of gone altogether.
Gone like the promises of lovers who believed in things like unicorns, and forever.

Gone as in never coming back.
Gone as in your parents can't even bring themselves to go into your old room you are gone like that.

But they all said you died instantly.

They said it as if in you is a grace to not linger like a tragedy in slow motion, or a heartbreak set on pause.

No slow cause of death for us all to deal with, they said it as if it was a relief. As if that's what you would have wanted.

And I have seen machines push life into the bodies of people who would rather just go and I know that's not something you would want. And I'm not saying I knew you better than most, but I'm pretty sure that you'd rather be alive.

Like the night we decided to drive to the observatory. We camped under the stars and got drunk.

One beer in you sunk it to nostalgia like a love seat tailor made for your body. Listed from memory the top 20 girls you never kissed but always wanted to.

Backwards, non-stop, twenty through two, you stopped at number one and said her name as if once upon a time.
You almost did.
We were alive that night.
We watched the dark bleed into twilight.
Watched the sunrise write novels on the backs of shinny black beatles and blades of grass.
We read the day cover to cover in one sitting.

Clouds splitting like lovers lost in the shuffle of trust and jealousy.

We read our favourite lines out loud.

Yours was "If my father is ever proud of me. It will mean in that some small measure I have lived better than him."

Mine was "If my life is the whim of a dreamer let them awake and remember the grand idea that I am."

The worlds was "Let them stem from me. Let them be picked and pressed into diaries. Let them be the tangible memories of writers who could not scribe fictions greater than those based on the true story of their histories."

Of course, the world didn't actually say that.
We were really high.
And for once. There was no because to the why.

We spoke like liars finally speaking truth.
Each word a confessional booth where we recounted our sins realizing the failures of our youth, are what make up the beauty of our age.

That every page turned cannot be re-written only re-read.
That every chapter we sped through needs to remain un-edited.

Exposing our screw ups like slips of the nipple on the evening news,
we were never perfect.
And we were only ever barley amazing.

But I've been thinking about the word instantly.
And how you lived.
Instant to instant.

Take for instance the night we met.
When you wiped the rain out of your face like sweat and said "It's not raining. It's just the weather trying to look busy"

We decided right then and there the inventor of the umbrella, was a pussy.

Three days later you were sick in bed, reconsidered your position and called me and said "Maybe he was just wise"

My heart is bending.
I keep re-reading the ending of your life expecting a next chapter.
I expect laughter as if it was always there.
I un-expect your death so hard that part of me believes I can make it not true.

You kept a rock,
on a satin pillow,
on your bookshelf and told me, "It's a star"
You said you found it in a junkyard, and it had been broken down for quite sometime.

Because too many people wished on it and that's a lot of pressure for one little star.

You are the smile I have kept secret.

The Atari 8 bit hero of my youth. And at the funeral your friends all looked at me as if to say "You're the writer"

So what?
I knew him, only as well as he knew me.
And when you told me he was gone.
I missed him.
Instantly.