I have this notion that if you live long enough,

there are three or four great stories that you will have in your life. 
A story of a journey or a transformation.

A story of love, which will likely mean the loss of love, a story 
of loss. And a story of spiritual illumination,

which, for many, will probably be the moment of death itself, 
the story untellable, its beginning and middle

and end collapsing with its teller into a disappearing conclusion.
I have believed long enough in my notion

to know that it is a romantic notion, that it erodes each time
I realize that the shard and not the whole

comprises a life, the image and not the narrative. Otherwise,
there’s no reason why all I remember of the airplane

I took as a child from one country to another
is the moist towelette packet we were given with our meal,

the wonder and absurdity of it. Or that, in love, 
high in a tree in the dark, and high, he and I sat in the rain-damp

branches and ate 7-11 donuts. Or this, this piece 
of a story that isn’t even mine, that isn’t even a story

but a glance of an experience, of the friend who held the stray
dog after it was struck by a car. Not knowing whether the dog

was dead, my friend called a friend 
who worked for a vet. Poke the dog in the eye, this friend said.

Because if the animal no longer has a blink reflex, 
it probably means the animal is dead. Decades after

college, when you could do such a thing, I typed his name
into a search engine to find out what became of the 20-year-old

boy from the tree. Like dozens of old keys
in a drawer, so many of the wrong people with the right name.

The child dead from leukemia, with a school gym
named for him. The wrestler who had a perfectly square jaw,

like a cartoon police detective in a fedora.
When I arrived at a page that was certainly

about him, I no longer knew the face but I recognized the life
that he had had. He had transferred to

another college, gone to film school, and become a producer
of TV documentaries. A film about fishermen, the harsh fishing

season in Alaska. A film about Abraham Lincoln
and a film about the last days of Adolf Hitler.

A film about the Sherpas who go up and down the Himalayas.