By a dingy pool in San Franscisco, the morning after his sold out show at the Filmore, Sean Daley casually told me: “I saw what you did. I saw you first in the crowd. Stopped dead. It was you I wanted, even if it was just your eyes. But I saw you give me away to your friend. If you would have kept me for yourself, you would have saved a lot of people a lot of pain. But you didn’t…just to gain someone’s approval. Don’t do that again.” I asked why he assumed I would not have gotten by heart broken if roles had been reversed. “You wouldn’t have. I know. It’s just the truth.”
He was wearing blue and the tour was gathering in the shade, desperate for breakfast. I looked past his wolf-bite eyes and watched the could-have-been past flash me before like the death movie of someone’s life.
As fortune, or its missing counterpart, would have it, it’s the last thing we said to each other.
Lives scatter. Tours go on. Babies are born. Deaths pile up like tattoos, indelible. And we make new futures, trying to ignore the past that never was.