MARGINALIA

Never Say Goodbye I was listening to Bon Jovi's Never Say Goodbye the other day, attempting to sing along, when suddenly I couldn't anymore. I really tried. The words were right there. I knew every one of them. But I couldn't get them past the lump in my throat. For a few minutes, I wasn't here anymore. I was back in a little bedroom in West Valley City with my cousin. We had become close after I moved to Utah when I was 7. She was two years older than me, and as we grew up, we spent a lot of time together. Weekends, sleepovers, music, boys, trouble. Especially trouble. Her parents weren't great with finances. Sometimes blankets hung over the windows instead of curtains. Sometimes the utilities hadn't been paid and the house was freezing. I remember taking cold showers there because there wasn't any hot water. It didn't matter. I wanted to be there because she was there. And she was so cool! There are things you tolerate easily w...

The Keeper of Forgotten Things There was once a man who remembered things that had never happened to him. He remembered the first bird discover the sky. He remembered the whales first  dive into the open ocean. He remembered the astonishment of the first flower when a bee landed on it. He remembered being rocked in the arms of a woman who'd died three hundred years before his birth. And sometimes, waking suddenly in the night, he remembered the last thoughts of children whose names he did not know. This made sleep difficult sometimes. When he was very small, he assumed everyone remembered things like these. "Do you remember when the elephants were afraid?" he had once asked his mother. "Nope." "They were walking." "Where?" "I.... don't know." "Then how do you know they were afraid?" He considered this. "Because they told me." His mother touched his forehead. "You haven't got a fe...