Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment

Missing was mysterious, maybe a little cool, dead is dead. Grief is selfish the way loving is futile; compelling, crucial, insufficient.

I forego a morning of work to play outside. Bret, frequent hitchhiker, moved the dead off the road with reverence and as an assist to scavengers. He would borrow something—a feather, quill, claw—as tribute. He could identify a plant’s family if not its specific name, and was my first teacher of Leave No Trace. He believed in me without condition, and wouldn’t let me return the favor. Bret lived quietly, bordering on ascetic, never taking more than he needed, punishing himself for things he wouldn’t discuss further than insisting weren’t from wartime. He was a gentleman and a joker who’d run away when he felt vulnerable and return to me loving. Oh, how we’d laugh, at and with each other, giggling, dancing, wrestling, writhing. Playing always outside, animals more than anything. Bret was childlike, honorable, wounded, passionate, and doomed. He was a dream come true. Now a body found in Florida, shattered hope in my hands, and a tattoo on my side that he messed up twice. I will love and miss Bret—for whom “two t’s is greedy”—forever.