"When Robert Burton

Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home." — Robert Bly, Early Morning in Your Room

We don't hug; we shake hands

Even when saying goodbye.

We both know it could be the last time we see each other. I'm forty, and he's nearly twice that. We're not children.

But age or not, that was always true. I could crash my car on the way to the airport. Or the plane could burst, scattering me over the north coast of France. We brachiate from breath to breath, trusting the next lungful to come the way sailors trust the water to hold them up, trust the tide to bring them home.

That's not what I'm trying to say. That life is absurd and unfair and never promised to anyone, to octogenarians gathering dust in antiseptic care homes or to infants crying in abandoned cribs.

You know all that, whether you admit it or not. That the next breath isn't promised, and in this infinite universe, everything is not only possible, but inevitable.

Maybe when you go to take the next breath, it's not there, and you choke and wheeze as the vacuum turns you inside out, the great Nothingness swallowing us all up at last.

Until then, we move around. The bubbling life in a petri dish, we spawn and bloom and wither and fade, and along the way, here and there, we come back.

Back to where it all started, my father's house sitting squat and sullen under the same low gray clouds I was born under.

Under the spreading branches of the huge ash tree I grew up beneath — Yggdrasil, the tall tree that connects the Nine Worlds, to a boy with a borrowed book of Norse mythology — now truncated and amputated, rotten limbs lopped off and shredded into mulch.

We seek our own ends, whether we know it or not. He's found his, the house he's owned for forty years.

It's too early to say whether I've found mine.

It's terrible to be young

And it's made more terrible by not having any kind of reference to what you are. Childhood carries with it certain iron rules of which no child is aware, and most adults have forgotten.

You trust your parents with your life because you have to, so when they tell you there's a jolly fat man dressed in red who comes by on the longest night of the year to deliver sweatshop presents to every house in the world, you believe it.

Then you find out it isn't true.

And maybe that's the point, the traditions we carry like a double helix in our bone marrow serving ends beyond ourselves. Like buying the kids a small pet, a hamster or gerbil, knowing it will die quickly and teach them a lesson about love.

The lesson, fundamentally, being not that you shouldn't get attached, that everything dies. But that attachment is necessary to spit in the face of death.

That the only way to overcome the sad fate of that tiny bundle of fur, yesterday so full of life, now quiet and cold, is to love the next one even more fiercely.

And, admittedly, more sadly.

We never had pets in my house.

Maybe there was a time of joy, of security, of blissful ignorance. I don't remember it. Then again, I don't remember a lot. The first twelve years of my life are hazier to me then the dreams I had last month, and certainly no more real.

Cobble it all together, and you get about two hours of flickering footage, the mysterious man standing on the grassy knoll, the big open-top car crawling so slow it starts to run in reverse.

And then, right at the crucial moment, the film bubbles and burns, leaving nothing but a bare white screen.

Most of what I remember isn't good. And it's no one's fault. I'm not here to blame my parents, to critique their performance of a job I've never had the guts to attempt.

I just remember being really, really sad.

Sad in the same way it rains in England. Sad in the way it rained this late May, when I last visited my childhood home where my dad still lives, where the dull gray sky, no higher than the sawn-off top of the ash tree in his garden, barely stopped weeping for even a minute.

But sadness isn't all I remember.

I'm talking about something else.

I'm talking about sitting at the top of the slide my father, a skilled carpenter, built around the massive scarred trunk of that tree, looking out over the garden he maintained alone, his tiny patch of order in the raging sea of chaos that is the universe we all share.

I'm talking about things that came later, after I started shaving and would come home to that garden with the sunrise, veins sparking and vibrating with a cocktail of chemicals that only a young liver could tolerate.

I'm talking about watching the sun come up through the spreading branches, watching the rain, after hours of maturing in the dark, suddenly turn to molten silver.

It's terrible to be young. Especially if you're the kind of person who can't stand a locked door. The kind who chooses freedom, no matter how painful, over any amount of gilding on the cage.

But the twisted branches of the towering tree were never a cage. Instead, they were a ladder reaching out to something beyond the prison my life was.

It was taller then than it is now. And one by one, I climbed every branch. Until one day, I took flight like lightning from the top and never looked back. A corona discharge that loses itself in the white-hot burst of an errant bolt, happy to vanish from the world in one brief moment of brilliance.

I was young the first time I traveled alone

And like freshly-hatched geese that imprint on the human who incubates them, the city I visited — Rome — is now threaded through my blood like nowhere else on earth.

I've written about this before, and probably more eloquently. This thing of ours, mobsters call it, because you dare not speak its name. Writers, too, ought to whisper.

This is dangerous. This should not be named. Like the secret and true name of Rome itself, jealously guarded by the high priests, perhaps forgotten now forever. To know something's true name is to have power over it.

And we don't want power over this, do we? We always feel like we may be in decline. Look up something good you wrote six months ago or five years ago or forty years ago.

If you're lucky, you'll be embarrassed by it.

If you're less lucky, you'll worry that you couldn't write something that pure and powerful today.

In Rome, back then, pre-mass terrorism, Rome was lousy with pickpockets. Usually children, years younger than me. They would swarm you, smiling sweetly, carrying blankets or newspapers over their arms. They would press themselves against you from all sides, pretending to be friendly.

It desensitizes you, you see. Being touched everywhere all at once makes you insensitive to the hand that creeps into your pocket, into your bag.

We can only feel so much, for a certain amount of time, before we become numb to it all.

I remember this now

Under a shorter tree, in a house that feels much smaller than it used to.

This is what I'm trying to say: that sadness, felt deeply enough, often enough, becomes who you are. It becomes your home. It becomes impossible to shed it without shedding yourself, and not every snake is strong enough to wriggle free and be reborn.

This is what I'm trying to say: that children, as a rule, feel things more intensely than adults do, precisely because they haven't felt as much. That's why harming them, hurting them, is so hatefully abhorrent.

This is what I'm trying to say: that we lose the wonder of the world. That everything is fascinating to us when we are children, every blade of grass, every ladybird, every star in my father's garden.

We want to know everything. We want to fill ourselves with the world the way every breath fills our lungs, and it feels like it will never be enough. It feels like we might burst from all the beauty we are surrounded with, that the pure force of being alive will split us open and reveal a heart studded with seeds.

We become desensitized. Overexposure burns out our nerve endings, and if you ate your favorite meal or drank your favorite drink every single day, you'd come to hate it.

This is what I'm trying to say: the world burns all of us out. And even a hated childhood carries within it something precious, precisely because it's easily lost.

We all become deaf to the wonder

That's what it means to grow up. We have bills to pay and mouths to feed, pulled down toward the Earth's molten core by endless responsibilities. You stop seeing what you see every day, the bright green magic of the grass bursting from the seed, the wild wanderings of the ants embarking on a perilous voyage across your front step.

Or nearer, dearer: the rich blood singing in your veins that you can do nothing about. The miraculous mystery of your crackling brain, that can shuttle back-and-forth from past to future in nanoseconds, that creates a whole world, unique and radiant, in the black bone vault of your skull.

This is what I'm trying to say: don't.

It's still raining at my dad's house

In my personal mythology, it's always raining there. Turning the pathway around the garden, concrete slabs studded with swelling stars of lichen, into a slick mirror of the nearby sky.

For me it will always be melancholy here. But mine aren't the only eyes in the universe. And to some, each shining leaf, each glistening branch, is another mirror life holds up to itself to see just how gorgeous it is.

I had to leave this place forever to keep seeing that kind of radiance. If I had stayed, I know I would have become incapable of feeling it.

But someday, this house will be sold after he's gone, and someone else may make a home under the still-spreading branches of that slow-dying ash tree.

And when they do, I hope they never get desensitized to it. I hope they see, every day, the same stray radiance I could only see when the watery gray light fell just right.