​I wear a sweater that is your favorite color. Nobody knows this but me and the other ones you left behind. Following is easy, steady trail simpler than crashing through the brush, and your hands never shook then, so wind me up and watch me go. Someone calls you crazy and I punch them in the throat. No one calls you anything and I cry. We hold no funeral. None of us know how to do this right.

I wear a sweater that is your favorite color. This is for many reasons, but mostly because the sheep you left behind was dyed with it by your bare hands, the night that could have been the beginning of something if i squinted, though of course all my beginnings are false starts. You were only twenty-five, and then you were twenty-five forever. None of us know how to do this right. You ran your fingers through his curls and christened him your only friend, and I sat by and fidgeted with the hole in my shirt from the shrapnel when I watched you die. The ghost wasn't good but he was company. So it goes. So I shear the sheep, so I reap your sowings, so I carry badges of honor for my rank as Dead Man’s Brother.

I wear a sweater that is your favorite color. Blue, always, shifting shades, teal then navy then cerulean. You woke up and brushed gravedirt from your hair and christened the bleeding crimson sunrise yours, and I sat with the sheep and our half-burnt flag and watched you live in lurid technicolor. It didn’t feel much different. Your shadow is the same color no matter how you paint yourself.

So where have we gotten? So you change your mind, live die live again, pick up things and drop them. Your hands shake but you still write with them. There are sea-salt days where I wish you’d never touched me but then the blue. But then the photo album. But then your smile through the phone. We still salute to say goodbye. None of us know how to do this right, but we do it anyways, for the love of it, for old times' sake, or whatever. Send me a sign in a lightning storm. Send me your book, unfinished. Send me a fresh lottery ticket. Ours won’t be the lucky one but I’ll tack it to the wall anyways.