While You Were Out

Do you remember what I was like back then, a food stamps kid so out of place among the shiny glass towers and $150 designer jeans and yet you hired me despite the uncertainty in my eyes and my lack of marketing experience but I guess I write a good cover letter and I can still remember how expensive the stores smelled and the Alamo-shaped facade of the building where I cut my teeth and I wanted so much to be as cool as you, so devil-may-care with your tinted glasses lenses and longish hair and gravelly voice and not a one of my business classes ever mentioned how much swearing there'd be in a creative office but not me I never said the right thing, never fit in, never rocked to the easy rhythm of belonging even that summer when most of the building went to happy hour every Thursday and I learned how to drink with all the young up-and-comings in Midtown and Deep Ellum and Lower Greenville and you used to rib me joking asking if you could buy my first and last drink because I'd have only one but you were always kind and warm witty creative and much smarter than I understood, you were the best and worst boss I've ever had coming in late because you needed stitches in your thigh after breaking into your own bathroom window because you got locked out and your weekend rockabilly band called The Dogkickers and those '70s mutton chops above a crisp shirt and tie, telling me "somehow, someway" we needed to anniversary that ad, schedule that photoshoot, launch that online merch drop, get through that ass-whip project whatever it was pretending I knew what I was doing while you glided by like an inner tube down the Guadalupe and I remember striding down Market Street to that magazine meeting when you insisted on walking closest to the busy road "because my mama raised me right" but not right enough to avoid bar fights, I had to type your emails for weeks, didn't I, and I still thought you were the most badass person I wanted to be like and never understood, but looking back I can see beneath your guitar strap and Jack Daniel's beside your Marlboro gold pack there was an immutable pain or struggle or never-ending reach for what I didn't know, not that it was any of my business, I wasn't one of your favorites though I desperately wanted to be, I wanted you to think as highly of me as I did of you, and now you're gone and nobody is saying what happened (no funeral no obituary) and that silence screams at me, I wish the broken parts of me had been able to speak to the broken parts of you and I just want you to know I still remember 4-5-4 fiscal calendars and how to write a 60 second ad spot and the way you walked me to my car after your show at Adair's Saloon with the graffiti on the walls just to make sure I was safe at night and I thought maybe I could be one-of-a-kind someday, too, maybe I could be one of those who holds on loosely but there's only one of us left to check the email messages now.