At my mom’s house I look at all the pictures of us, myself, from ages ago: I smile happily from beneath the brow a Yankees cap that is still new as I lean back on the couch.

In my head, I still look like this 35 year-old guy. Bright and ready. Confident. But I know my head is a liar, because my shoulder aches and when I woke this morning plantar fasciitis had me limping to the bathroom like a cowboy with a broken hip.

I also think about what I believed then — more often than I'd like to acknowledge (yet, not all the time) — that I was ugly and damaged and needed to struggle to prove myself. All for reasons that happened decades before the camera's shutter caught the image I see today.

I close the picture album hoping I can help my boys see themselves without the kinds of distortion I brought to myself and curved my life invisibly.

I want them to see themselves as they are: beautiful and good and worthy.

I start by getting up and finding the baseball gloves: Hey, guys, want to toss the ball around?

Somewhere in college, basketball sneakers with velcro snaps got hot.

I bought a pair and the first morning I was putting them on, my dad saw me in the kitchen adjusting the adhesive bands.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I wish you wouldn’t wear them.” His voice was flat, dull.

Just like, Dad, I thought. Never likes anything I do.

Then he said: “It reminds me of my Dad after his stroke. He couldn’t tie his shoes so they made him wear shoes like that.”

I glanced at him and saw a son with his face turned away. And I had a vision of him as a young man helping his father with braces and shoes at the bedside. I felt him aching with the yearning-to-be-understood-babble of the man who’d once painted and talked and charmed with the terrible beauty the Irish were known for. I felt the loss behind the curtain that this now man, my father, kept shut away from me, and maybe himself, so successfully that I did not even know it was there until those words.

It was the most personal thing he’d ever told me.

I wrapped the shoes up in tissue and put them back in the box. I returned them the next day.

I listened in the dark as she told me about the time she played Cassandra in a small town production of Troilus and Cressida. A roomful of men listened with arms crossed and “I gotta see this” faces. Then she tilted her head back and took the burning sword in her mouth, swallowing the blue flame like an easy cupcake.

She couldn’t see me, but I know she felt it: My incredible wonder that I was laying in bed with such beauty and power and courage.

The first time, I heard a man tell 500 people in a church basement about how he broke his teeth on a cement step and didn’t go see a dentist right away because he had no insurance. Instead, he superglued his teeth back into his mouth and every few days, when they fell out again, he’s squeezed that tube of bondo and put them back in place.

Then one day, there was nothing doing and he finally went to the free clinic where a dental student said, in genuine wonder, “What’s going on here?’

Even that didn’t wake him up.

The room roared with every word.

It was, for sure, tragic and funny. But it was also hopeful, because there he stood behind a microphone telling us about who he had been, and living proof that change could be had.

It didn’t sound anything like my story. Or anything I knew. But standing there in the suit I had donned to prove I didn’t belong, I recognized the despair I had woken up from the morning before. In the loneliness he shared, I felt my own loneliness and knew that I had found the place where I had to be.

And that was my first time.

There was excitement in the morning when dad was gone before dawn.

“He’s gone sailing with SC’s dad,” Mom explained from the kitchen door. “He’ll be back late today.”

SC was a slightly older girl in the neighborhood who read comic books forbidden by my mom. The boat in their drive made the house look small.

I imagined dad in his Navy dress whites captaining on the whitecaps of Lake Michigan. Where would he go? What would the find?

I couldn’t wait to hear the story.

When he got back he was wordless and lay down on the couch in the front room under the window in the late light of the day. His lanky body stretched limply across the brown cushions. He didn't even take his shoes off. He just closed his eyes and turned his sunburned face away.

He had gotten drunk on the trip and while it turned out to be a rare moment (I can count the times I’ve seen him drunk since on one hand), this was the first.

I never heard about the adventure.

A few years later SC’s dad committed suicide and they moved away.

The winter light was hard. Unforgiving.

It made her look all the more frail, weeping in a fur coat: Irish eyes helpless with what had happened.

Her sister had died and my dad was taking her back to the Villa Adolorada where she lived and would die herself a few years later.

“My sister is gone,” I heard her say. “Helen’s gone. I’m all alone.”

My dad hugged her. “I know,” I remember him saying. “I know.”

He looked around in his top coat, uncertain about this place where the world had put him with his mother.

It was the only time I ever saw my grandmother, Mary Kay, cry.

I saw it out of the corner of my eye as I passed from one room to the next, all of 4 seconds some 40 years ago.

And it was forever.

When the woman in the dark suit asked if anyone wanted to speak, I did not go up. I felt I hadn’t known T as an adult well enough. I didn't have any funny anecdotes. Or perfectly preserved memories. Seven years my junior and my cousin, our family spent many a Christmas and Thanksgiving with his family. We’d hung spoons from our noses at the kids’ tables. We’d fidgeted among the kids as we all waited for his father to spool the super 8 film of “The Night Before Christmas” through the projector every December 24th. We’d run through the grass together on humid summer midwestern nights.

And so he was important to me in his own right.

And I loved his family — his mom and dad and two sisters — and him, despite the separate worlds adulthood had taken us. Now he lay in the dark wood coffin at the top of the room, frozen in forever at 48.

But I did not go up when the open call was made. Instead, I thought of the moment my sister had called a few days before to tell me he had died suddenly of heart attack.

What?! The response was immediate and short. It was a small word for a full and huge question that asked for an answer bigger than the universe could deliver because the answer was whole universe itself.

What?! I said again. I walked down the hall with my sister’s voice in my ear, and suddenly felt myself pushing up against a gray wall that was like a solid but synthetic fog in front of me. My face leaned into and stretched it across my lips, my nose, my eyes . What was beyond? Nothing? I didn't know. Yet I was familiar with it.

I had seen it before, when the wheels fell off early on in therapy. Talking to a paid ear, it had appeared in front of me like a sheet, not against me (as it was now with my whole being pushing into it, trying to reach through it). As quickly as it appeared to me in the office, it was gone. But the office not the same as before. It was more alive and vibrant and all the sounds of it made a silence that was full of more life than ever before.

I thought of it again after I’d help lay the casket down in the cold of the graveyard with six others and the mother of his daughter stepped up and read from The Lord of the Rings:

PIPPIN: I didn't think it would end this way.
GANDALF: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.
PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?
GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
PIPPIN: Well, that isn't so bad.
GANDALF: No. No, it isn't

Shivering, it struck me that I didn’t need to wait for the grey rain-curtain to roll back. That I could peel it back at any time. The far green country is always here and now if you are willing.

In flash, I was glad I was there with everyone in the cold, listening with everything I have to go home and smile at my kids and kiss my wife furiously.

I am not thinking about how I am myself and the world is the world when I lay down as a sack of bones.

I am not thinking about how I am separate from the universe, an organic machine with its own soul that must master it all to show its existence is worthwhile, when she asks: How has the week been? Is the shoulder better?

I am not thinking of how I can not see myself with my own eyes and yet I think I know how I look to others, as I tell her “It’s better, but not there yet” and flex to feel the knot in my back that I want undone.

She puts a hand under my chin and asks “Here?” and then goes to my ankle and says, “So here.”

She sinks the needle midway down my shin and like that a relaxation comes into my shoulder.

And I see that a rock turning round a star on the edge of galaxy turning in a universe of universes is as connected to everything as everything.

The center of everything is everywhere.

That is why my right shoulder feels better when a needle pierces my left calf.

It’s sort of insane. In a good way.

And I wonder, would I feel even better if an asteroid swung two feet to the left of the star on Orion’s hip?

You run after time until you’re out of breath and bent over heaving.

And you run some more.

You ask over the phone, “Is your refrigerator running?” and the voice says back, “Yes,” and you say back, “You better go catch it before it gets away.” And collapse in laughter.

And you pick up your shoes and run some more.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking, which is a stolen thought direct from Roger Waters, but perfectly captures that sense of time getting away.

Like the refrigerator.

And you run some more.

From meeting to meeting, from house to house, from girl to girl, from baseball game to swim meets, to marriages and therapy appointments.

You run between breaths with your eyes closed.

You run in your sleep and wake up in a sweat thinking this is gotta end, but hoping it never does. (But it does.)

Yeah, you run. From baby to toddler to kid to teenager to someone who runs blindly to middle age until you land in a bed that is your last place. But even there you are running.

Running out to White Hen. Because that’s where you run when you run out of anything.

Run run run.

DMC. Run.

Just run.

Run when you sit and you stand and you kneel. Run when you run around the track.

You just run. Until at least you break through and see it for a moment and realize it was there all along and that you could never catch it because it’s uncatchable.

Completely, 100%, uncatchable.

And that’s alright you think as you catch your breath and feel the sun.

When I was a boy, I was a sucker for girls with books.

So nowadays I’m used to coming across books in my library with inscriptions in them — dusty words from ghosts.

A little while ago, when I picked one up, I remembered reading it in Z’s apartment. The loneliness of her world made bearable by the words she’d given me, bound in a wood spine. The story was like a prayer Z wanted me to know.

Z was not nice to me, ultimately — though I’m sure she felt the same about me.

But one thing’s for sure, the world she put in my hands — and that I poured into my mind while sitting on a purple couch as she slept alone in a room not more than 10 feet away — that world still lives in me. And sometimes I think that that whole relationship was worth it just to get that.

It was about the heart and love and the world that tried to leash these powers down and keep them under control. And the tragedy that so often follows such restrictions.

It was called “The God of Small Things” but there was nothing small about it at all.

In the dream, we’re in a farm field with our couples counselor, M. The field is carpeted with a rich deep green grass, dark with rain, and bending down into a hollow. There’s a red clay wall at its center where you stand as others from a short line look at pictures of you from when you were a kid and confront you with what they see. I watch someone being told by strangers how they see his past. His shoulders slump a little. His head falls. It’s all part of an exercise that M has concocted. We’ve agreed to try, but I am frightened by it now.

I turn. I’m at a curving red diner booth with you at the edge of the field. M is there to tell us what she has learned. Somehow our oldest is there too. He knocks a glass of milk off the table and it shatters on the floor under the booth. I look down. A big crescent shard of sharp glass wobbles in the milk near a rusting chair leg. As I focus on it, I feel your anger and frustration at the interruption. You won’t get the chance to hear what M found out.

Then we are in a truck going along a green road, just me and you and the kids, to do something else M has asked. We turn up a muddy track to find a place. We pass an old beaten tract home with a low cinder block wall around the back and a rusting swing set. It’s up on a little hill and we briefly think to stop and knock on the door but we don’t.

We drive another 500 yards to where the wire fence ends and park to climb to the top of a small knoll. We start the exercise M has set out for us. The house we passed to get here glows in the distance.

Suddenly the owner of the house is out driving wildly around us. He is Ernest Borgnine and he is crazy angry. We’re on his property. We’re disturbing him. Get off! Now!

We yell we didn’t know. We say we are almost done. Who knows if Ernest Borgnine hears us through the open window of his old pickup truck?

Then he is gone. I re-assure you that it’s okay if we finish what we are doing (whatever it is). It’s unnerving but I feign confidence and we continue until I am pelted by a paint ball. I know it’s come a long way because it doesn’t hurt when it hits me. I look to the house. It’s Ernest Borgnine‘s kids shooting at us.

I yell again. We’re almost done. We’re about to leave. Stop. We have kids with us.

They don’t care. I start to get angry.

Suddenly, the shooter is there. He is big and broad shouldered in a football jersey that’s torn at the midriff. He tries to intimidate us. We’re scared and angry. We tackle him and attack. Then I realize what’s happening. Wait, I say. This is wrong. We can’t hurt him.

We step away from him laying face down on the wet grass.

In a flash the scene changes and I’m in someone else’s body that is also mine. I’m heavily tattooed with dark tribal patterns. I am standing in a narrow hallway leading to the stage. I feel exhilarated and naked; strong and aware.

I am also wearing a cheerleader outfit. It is a joke, a Britney Spears pastiche, but it is weird.

Someone is trying out for the band. It is the kid from the house who intimidated us in the field. He wants to be the drummer.

The dark patterns on my skin hide me from him. He passes me without realizing he knows me from before. I can also tell he is afraid. He thinks we are tough so he is tough. He does not realize that our inked shells are just masks we look through, protective signs of our inner tenderness.

A test for the try-out appears in my mind. I begin to weep and my band mates — who know me as even I do not know myself — begin to cry with me. I twist in the cheerleader uniform and go to each band mate with a pink balloon that I blow up myself and give them in place of my heart. Each takes it protectively in acknowledgment of what I am feeling.

I bend to offer it to the boy who does not recognize me. He is more afraid and unsure than ever.

Will he take it?

I wake before finding out and scramble to write it all down before it evaporates in the rising light of morning.

The old bookseller used to say, “Don’t just look at your books. Touch your books!” When I asked why he said simply, “Because when you do they synaptically register in your mind and when someone asks for one a complete picture of exactly where you saw it will appear to you and you will go to it without the slightest hesitation.”

And he was right.

I get home and you don’t look like the person I remembered. You are hard and angry. You make no effort to be anything else.

You think I blame you but I don’t.

I just see you as you are. And I reflect back what I see. Hard anger without any romance. Frustration. Disappointment.

You ask if I’m upset with you. How can I tell you? Do you really want to know?

I’m not sure I understand the point at the moment and just say I’m reading. But the ink and paper is useless on my mind and I go to sleep. And later when I find you sleeping on the couch and ask you back, I think maybe this is a restart.

It’s not. We just go back to sleep. Except I can’t sleep.

I’m here in the dark, writing this, while everyone sleeps.

And I’ve only been away two days.

It was in the old brown house where the willow bulged in the backyard above the roof like a depressed balloon. We were sitting at the cherry wood dinner table and they were arguing about something when she said him, “And there you are, taking potato chips out of the bowl like you’re some kind of King. King William G. Walsh.” I remember him reaching at that moment into the wooden bowl and pulling a misshapen oval of salt out. His look stretched down his long nose and was made longer by his arm.

Before he could get the whole thin cut delicacy to his mouth, she grabbed the bowl and suddenly chips were falling like big brown tears in the dinning room.

We cried as she banged though the kitchen door and she backed the Volkswagen down the drive past the dinning room window to go no-one knew where.

We were artists who weren’t making art and we settled for the only way to signal that we belonged to that class of free thinkers we wanted to be seen to be part of. We drank.

We were poor, too.

So we held a party the first Thursday of every month at our apartment and anyone was welcome. The deal was simple. We’d make gin gimlets, chilled and straight up, no rocks. Period.

If you didn’t want that, then you needed to bring your own.

And people did that. Beer. Wine. Vodka. Whiskey. Anything to avoid the gimlet.

Of course, a few tried one, but usually only one. Its sweet, citrus power was true and real. It went down well, but then exploded in the brain. Women had to step out of heels to walk the hall. Drivers had to be called to take people home. And the apartment was smeared with laughter and jazz and minds soaked in boozy lime slosh.

The best part was, at the end of the night, our gallon of gin was still nearly a gallon of gin. But a months worth of beer and wine and vodka and whiskey was left behind. So we could drink until the next first Thursday.

“I love this place!” someone said once. “It’s nothing but books and records! Why can’t I live here?!”

It was a funny thing to hear because no could really live there. Not for long, anyway.

Still we could go on believing we were artists, though we didn’t make art.

The fingers move back and forth like the tic toc of an old clock. Tic. Toc. Tic. Toc. And I float back into a world of memories that peel away like the petals of a flower that never ends. One after the other, the forgotten rooms and smells come back. I walk hard wood floors of apartments I haven’t been in in years. Girls and women swim by. A garage of Truth or Dare is suddenly with me and then on to the next thing. And then I see my wife that first time we laid under the cold windows of the 157th Street place. Her skin shimmers with softness before me and I can feel the warmth of her there. The muscle in my chest becomes a softened heart and tears come in sheets of good. I don’t know why — except that I am grateful for her.

What is this place I am in that lives inside but I do not know?

I once told the therapist that I decided to give it a shot because I had somehow changed 18 years ago. I’d put the bottle down and taken a new road, so anything was possible. Even change.

But now that I am nearly 20 years on, I’ve seen the sudden knife inside me come out to stab blindly, driven by a machine I have no control over.

Days afterwords, I can only hope that the people I have chosen — and who have chosen me — can still see the part of me they love, the part that is worth waiting for and being with.

Yet I can never promise them that I will ever be able to control this thing. Or that it will ever go away. No matter how many steps I do, or how many hours I sit on a couch barfing out myself onto a paid ear.

I will always be myself and that being will always be part of that self. And while there may be no center to the onion, the onion is still an onion.

It makes me wonder if there is really a point to anything at all.

Except that I know I love, too. But in this time of hurt, where is that being? Why is it not turned on to keep the knife quiet and in its sheath?

Love, I need you now more than ever.

I’m slow and angry with the fight. She told me I ruined Christmas again. That I’m awful at birthdays. I had to beg her to sleep in our bed where we never touch.

I might as well have been drunk.

And I’m seeing less and less the difference between here and 18 years ago. Except if I were alone I’d be hurting no one but myself.

A Lyft driver named Innocent picked me up today. During the ride he told me his eldest child was murdered 2 years ago at the age of 24. He asked if I believed in God. I told him believed there was something connecting us but I was baffled about how it worked, or what it was. I heard his anger and his sorrow. We wondered why the universe allowed such suffering. Then we agreed that we only really had the moment we were in as he drove along. And for a brief moment I felt like I was known and knew him and it was maybe the most alive moment I ever had.

The bookstore never really existed without Christmas. Even in the warmer Chicago springs, Mr. B piped “The Nutcracker Suite” through the PA system. So when the actual season did come, everything got turned up to 11, sometimes 12.

One year, I remember a late afternoon delivery of a huge bowl of ice and champagne. Mr. B watched the white gloved men put it on his round oak table in the back. He took a moment to read the card that came with it and jumped into nervous action. “Mr. P is coming! Quick! Put the art books out! When he gets here, close the store!”

It seemed odd to me that the arrival of one person could lead us to shut the store, but sure enough when Mr. P showed up at 5:30, we ushered out our customers and locked the door. He was not a particularly tall man — more of a perfect medium build. But in his blue cashmere top coat, he looked like money.

Champagne flutes were handed out and everyone took a glass. Then Mr. P proceeded to spend 30 minutes with each clerk, and an hour with Mr. B, to find out what we were all reading. Each recommendation was placed on the table with the champagne and Letty, the accountant, added it to his tab.

I sold every book I’d read that year to him, starting with John Casey’s, Spartina, and went home drunk and charmed with the feeling that I’d touched some old world of plutocrats and literature where I danced with Tolstoy and Hemingway and thin women with names like Plath and Parker.

Six months later I remember Letty complaining about Mr. P as she stamped “Final Notice” on a bill that she was stuffing into an envelope with a Pebble Beach address.

Mr. P was in arrears.

“The Nutcracker Suite” swirled from the stereo anyway. I’m pretty sure Spartina was sitting on a shelf in some huge house overlooking the Pacific Ocean, spine unbroken.