The October we mapped the quarries,
you were the cartographer of what-if,
your kingdom of mica-flecked granite
and birch-choked ravines charted
in graphite on stolen paper.
We swore oaths on arrowheads
we told ourselves were Abenaki.
We were brothers in a mythology
of dirt and borrowed time.
Tonight, a notification—that blue glow
that promises nothing good after midnight.
A wall of pixelated condolences
from people who called you “buddy.”
I scrolled, expecting the old fear realized:
a climbing rope frayed, a misjudged cliff,
the kind of beautiful, stupid end
we romanticized in damp wool sweaters.
But there was no myth.
Just a patch of black ice on the steps
of a sensible Subaru. Aneurysm.
Instant, the doctors said. Tidy.
And below the GoFundMe link,
a comment from a man I’d never seen.
He wrote how you’d just found his number,
how you were planning a trip back home
to map the woods behind his house again.
And there it was. The surprise ending.
Not that you were gone,
but that our kingdom had a different king.
That I was just the first draft.
