00:00three months after the daffodils sprouted in the hard earth over joseph mcgowan's grave i began being haunted by twos
00:05two shoes two chairs on my front porch two eyes in the mirror looking back at me two wheels on
00:10the bicycle i rode each evening circling perfect two-mile stretches around my little college town
00:15i saw them everywhere two pairs of two windows in my now totaled honda civic which i rolled right through
00:19two mesmerizing red lights hanging off each end of the stoplight wire two four-leaf clovers given to me by
00:24an old man on walnut avenue two pairs of two leaves and two clovers passed between two pairs of hands
00:29and ten pairs of fingers i began to start my days later and end them earlier there was too much
00:34to notice too many pairs to take in and it exhausted me late at night near the halfway point on
00:39my bike route little kids and flip-flops and tankini tops would haunt the ice cream shop downtown
00:43and on this particular june tuesday a father stood with his little daughter on his shoulders and she seemed much
00:48more interested in pulling at her father's thinning hairline than the chocolate waffle cone they were sharing
00:52she moved her hand back and forth picking at something invisible and i realized my hand was moving with hers
00:57mimicking her from down the street swiping across my handlebars and feeling the divot and joseph's scalp where the two
01:02hemispheres of his skull had fused together as a baby
01:05after a moment i regained my lucidity and in a pit of shame peddled away this was all pretty par
01:10for the course though i had an inexplicable habit of a
01:13upsetting myself out on these nightly bike rides i replayed the same memories over and over and these xerox copies
01:18grew fuzzier and fuzzier until there were merely a few looping frames that summarize the scene
01:22a hand in hair a hospital bed a wake a funeral repeating until i hardly remembered what it all really
01:28looked like
01:28and i knew it wasn't doing me any good to obsess like this i was even ready to accept some
01:32of the platitudes people say when assigned the impossible task of comforting the grieving
01:36that it's all part of a greater plan and there's a meaning to it all that just hasn't been revealed
01:41and i thought that maybe i didn't need it to have any meaning that i was a realist
01:44that i knew that the hand of god waved left or right and that was that but when i got
01:48home that evening the fireflies
01:50six legs and two wings each were beginning to rise away from their noisy landlocked cricket neighbors
01:54and two fluttered their way into my bike lock i absent-mindedly brushed them away and in the process crushed
02:00them in my hand
02:01and i looked down in horror at the destruction i'd caused at the two lives i'd obliterated and i wanted
02:06to feel some kind of remorse
02:07but they were just two little dead fireflies and for a moment it was a little comforting to imagine that
02:12maybe we were just too small
02:13that my own personal tragedy is just a minor footnote in the great big tapestry of human experience
02:19but i couldn't accept that it was small it was so big to me it was everything to me
02:23why couldn't it be everything to everyone else
02:26so
02:26and
02:26so
02:26and
02:26so
02:26and
02:26so
02:26and
02:26and
02:26so
02:26and
02:28and
