Prologue

I remember the highways, they are my imbedded memories, probably the very own thing I will see when I am dying, but that I had already. Once. In a town I can’t recall any more than the roads that took me to it in the first place, or the reasons that made me stay, or the boy. Especially the boy. The one I thought I would never forget, but did.

I know that it was summer and that Jason was broken. Outside the temperature rose above the thirty degrees. I remember, like a re-run videotape memory, how through the car window I could see the pavement evaporating into acid clouds of dust and I can still feel, like a box-storage sentiment, how the thin layer of glass was the only friction that separated us from the real world, from the present, now past, and even from the uncertain future we never thought we could want.

It took me eighty miles of concrete, five desolated houses, and less than eleven speeding cars to realize that we were going nowhere and that the silence was even more unbearable than the screams. I knew that even if they didn’t, the words they had said two hours before would hunt them for the rest of their lives, running behind all the possibilities of ever making it right again. But I don’t want to talk about how in that car ride my father’s son turned to a stranger and my brothers’ father into a tyrant. Neither about the past, what good is it anyway? It doesn’t changes a thing, my wilted dreams amongst the impossibility of altering the time, the white blood events of my youth. So no, I won’t talk about what we could have done, what we didn’t do. Instead I would just plaster the image of my aching yesterday’s like a tinted photograph in a reconstruction process. I would do what I returned here to do. And that’s to talk about the anonymous town that took my brother’s life away; Ashbury. Even now, years ahead from it, the name of it on my lips stills sounds chipped. Not necessarily ancient but ashen, like his name, forgotten. My lingering presence on its roads still makes me shiver, and the house I am now standing in, along with the remnants of what it meant to my soul, even now, hurt.