Best laid plans

This was going to be the day, the night. It was the one island I could spot in the sea of busy, a little laundry, some TV, picking up a book and playing with my dog, then earlier to bed with a vain hope to be healthy, wealthy and wise, or some subset thereof.

But the phone tickles my waist as I'm about to turn onto the interstate and, as I curse myself yet again for becoming one of those people, I fumble to flip it open and attempt, at the same time, to keep from causing a five-car pile-up. It's not a number I recognize flashing on the screen and I know as I glance to my left that if I were the guy in that Celica I'd be flipping me off about now.

"Hello?"

There are days and weeks at a time when, despite the fact I can't actually see over the pile of paper on my desk, I feel as though I can see around corners, can lift a ton, that I walk on earth so solid beneath my feet that it might as well be forged steel. These are days and weeks I feel invincible, that my world is in order, that my life is changing in all the right ways and my family is safe and my loves are assured.

And two martinis later, that world is questions and doubts and the ground not so much steel as tin that crimps and bends and threatens to give way.

I know my friends so well they could easily live inside my flesh and sometimes it feels, in every way that's holy, like they do, and still I can be surprised. Saddened. Speechless.

"Yes, I can be stricken speechless." Not aloud, but two empty glasses between us and another round on the way and in my mind I'm already parrying the quip from Curt or Jeff that I know will come in another hour or so when I relay the news.

The Twins are splitting up.

"Spending some time apart" is how he put it, almost casually even as he was on the verge of tears, an utterly devastating thing for a man to say of another whose side he hasn't left for more than a day in almost 15 years. He won't cry, not here, not in this place that isn't the sort of place where two men hold hands, although I reach for and grasp his anyway. You wouldn't think he'd cry at all, but I know my friends so well, and each of them wears a tough guy uniform that contains a creature too gentle to live among even the noblest of we savages.

The last time I held a man who cried, the last time I was grasped by the shoulders as my body shook with my own sobs, the matters were sickness, mortality, the injustice of a game that no one can win. This, this "spending some time apart", seems just as grave, but he leaves before I can offer a comfort of arms and understanding. He will cry later, he will cry alone. It's what tough guys do.

It's been a tough year in certain circles. One of us left, one of us is leaving, two of us fell in love and two of us just fell. Jobs and money got lost. One of us made a life, and one us, finally, made peace with himself. They say the world changed around us, and certainly, a lot of our world changed within us. We danced and we sang and we drank and we kept right on living, kept right on denying that we couldn't stay just the way we were.

And now the Twins are splitting up.

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