My friend came into my life by accident, it shouldn't have happened. But it did because accidents happen and because I open my door to strangers. We have known one another through several seasons,several disasters, and through to survival. I've known him through several unnatural disasters. I didn't know him through most of his lifetime and so many disasters. He came with long hair, with his sleeves full of tricks, and with no one to love. He was a very good criminal. His arms were camouflaged with tattoos, hiding a knife wound and showing the face of the Green Man god of paganism, He came full of untold stories and unspoken wreckage, ghosts from his past haunting his days and opiate-eyed nights. He was magnetic and missing teeth, scarred, and he didn't trust anything or anyone. He'd nearly died so many times I sometimes wonder if he really exists. He talks of a span of months during which his three friends- closest friends, without closeness- died one after the other. How many times could he come so close before he would become just another ghost? But I began calling him miracle man at the beginning when we waved our hands and signs and he a big painted daisy in the direction of one another's windows, when we both lived in the same block, and I suppose that's just what it is. Small miracles and unexplained things and what you'd never expect to happen- they all happen around him, He is a catalyst but the reactions he causes are not always miraculous or inspiring. He'd be the first to admit he's a catalyst for lost teeth and bloodshed. I wouldn't say it but by more than one I've been likened to chaos. We are both messy and we both like it. His abnormal mind began to grow out of him and stretch to places that can't be conceived of yet, and yet even more abnormal became obvious his evolving awareness of the changes. Many of those changes came about as a coin flips from one side to the other. Not too long ago, his whole life was critically altered. He escaped from an abusive alcoholic, a woman he'd lived with for fifteen years, and because of his absent parents and cruel foster families, she must have been his primary attachment figure. He didn't know about how other people lived, he didn't know a comfortable relationship, or a form of love that hadn't been twisted into something nefarious and destructive. He escaped and bought a boat. He was free for the first time, and his mind stretched out for more, beyond imagination. Before his escape, everything was making wreckage around him. I had grown so close with him, we spent time together just to while away the hours he needed to talk about what he had seen and done and how he managed to live on in bewilderment. The night before he had to move every trace of himself out of the place he'd been at a window's glance distance, we painted the walls all night and day. He painted enormous colourful, turbulent maelstroms in one corner. I painted on the wall the words; there are no words for moments like these. It was a warm-weather time, when wax melted in the trees and light t in through the blinds and seemed to move like sharks, carrying drifts of powders and pollen and the residue of paint on walls. Dust is invisible unless there is sunlight
I wasn't always there to help pull him out or give him shelter. I was brittle then, fresh from being mind-fractured, still healing. I now hold myself together and it makes him proud. I said 'forgiveness' to him one day and innumerable black echoes ceased, and everything was peaceful then. He forgave his birth mother and I managed to get her online, had the privilege of being there for their first conversation since he was put into foster care. He is not a criminal anymore. He is a one-man circus, a 5 star performance. He's also the standing ovation that you never expected you'd be so relieved to hear in all it's thunder. The roof beams raise high and the ground is shaking because you are getting stronger and your life is changing. He tells me that letting him into my life saved his. Knowing I had done something like that changed mine.
He keeps a scrapbook now, as I do. He let me photograph some pages.
