A PERSONAL MYTH

Bruce was a friend from college. One of those friends you made that reminded you of no one you had ever met and so therefore became an icon of the time that shaped you into how you came to be now. Bruce taught me to listen to strange music no one had ever heard. He told me stories of people living larger than I had imagined and led me on adventures I once boasted of and now, in my mature life, seldom mention outside of remaniscing with equally once outrageous friends.
There was a time when we both lived in a vegetarian commune called the Big Yellow House. We lived day to day with most beautiful hippie women and while I wrote Bruce's term papers, Bruce taught me how to get lost in mirrors and juggle in pairs across a room.
Once when a cousin of mine dissappeared, Bruce spent days asking every friend he knew for news. And so it was that late in the halfway span of the pre-dawn night, in a park by an urban lake, Bruce figured it out. One of the Jaden brothers, Damon, told him she had gone across state, sent to live with farmer relatives by her father. Such a good friend he was, Bruce walked with me down to the train yard near the Big Yellow House, climbed up into a box car and stood side by side with me as the line pulled us south and east across the mountains, the forests and the starlit desert on our way to find her...which we did.
But years and leaves both fade and fall aside. The paths we each shape are loth to lie twain, invariably spiralling askew, casting bright then faint firework trails whose totalled brilliance we are lucky to recall with nostalgia. As my time went by I travelled far and met many whose faces I had never seen, whose experiences hadn't crossed with mine. Trains, smoke and mirrors fell from day to day and the works of a career came to house my day to day.
And so it is that I find myself older, more professional and more like the strangers on the bus than my own old pictures. I see none of my old friends, my cousin, nor even the places that all these memories came to happen in. But once I was lucky. Just once I got a glimpse of my own past and it was good to come back to it for even just the few moments that it passed. I found myself, one night late after work, trapped under a downtown bridge by a winter rain. Having a smoke pointed the time and it was about halfway down the white paper column with smoke clouding slowy and stately up into the night sky as it was pierced by cold drop columns that I saw him walking consequently by my path.
"Bruce." I said. And with a glance to his right through the urban gloom he stopped and smiled and said, "It figures that it would be you."