For Joshua Saying goodbye is like pushing for hysteria’s eternity on a cold wall that won’t ever bother budging even a bit and taunts you like the photographs with folded corners and faded tops that have caught fire from staring too hard for too long. And using your legs won’t help— they were supposed to carry you so far in your life and support the others, too; too heavy to move and you'll break before the wall will tiptoe toward maybe a more comfortable place just a few inches away; inches are space to breathe in. A wall, like the past, cannot ever move; time doesn't deign to that, so sad-blue and powerless it dares make us feel with a grip that’ll only scald and not burn because the masochism would be an out and the past does not permit us the treat. Listen, though, because goodbye is a reckoning to about-face and notice, then greet, the rest of the room, waiting as it always has and true—that it's unchanged is so full of sorrow for you, the fullness so hidden to all those unknowing backs. Know that in your greeting you can find a way to cheat time in a manner you'll need to make into a familiar friend who you've been to hell with and back but you are here now, ringing, the bell in conversation. You listen politely to what time has plattered for your counterparts while you knowingly wait your turn to turn ‘round to that wall you know stands behind you with illuminated and illuminating photographs whose dancing corners will cheer you all now, and now you have more eyes than just yours looking straight-on at the wall that only you can see— and that's okay, because we all have walls and one day we’ll all be walls, stationed forever: ‘o guardian— you melt into the frame and you wear his smile on your own face and ours, and you laugh, and so do we.