Dear Son,

I know by the time you read this, I won’t be here anymore. You’ll be young still, wiser and aged by many years. I hope you can reflect on it all. Time won’t be how God once made it. You’ll live long enough to feel it way down in you and carry it within like a furnace out of Hell. You’ll doubt very much the ways of this world.

It ain’t fair, maybe you appreciate this by now. You’ll spend days on end working with your hands--sweating and your hands will bleed and burst with calices and blisters and your back will stay hurting--and you’ll spend nights in bars and nights in jail and nights on the road, on your own with great lights like the eyes of paradise peering down the dark highway toward the unknown, and nights in the arms of a woman you’ll grow to love who’ll grow to hate you, and many nights under perfume sheets with women you don’t love at all.

When your grandfather dies, your grandmother will ask you for a cigarette and you’ll hand her one and y’all will smoke for a few minutes and not speak a word and her make-up will become ruined from her painted tears and then just before she steps on the cigarette she’ll say that she looks like a whore and feels way worse. That’s right, the only decent man in this world you know will die too, just like every other son of a bitch.

You’ll bury your best friend. There’s one night in Redneck, Georgia where y’all tripped mushrooms with T.B. and Skunk and Ridge and his girlfriend and two of her friends and laughed like hyenas at God knows what for five hours without cease, and at dawn when the fog crossed the moon your buddy looked out at the river and then looked at you ghostly, in the eyes, and said he wants to do something great in this world and won’t settle for anything less. Four years later he’ll die of a heroin overdose at 23 and you’ll put him into the earth.

You’ll see your friends get great salary jobs, and graduate from medical school and law school and you’ll still be living week-to-week, on a good week, and you’ll chase your dreams and fail for so long you’ll appreciate very much the books of Moses. You don’t rightly know where you’re headed and it scares you but it’s alright my son. Just say shit, sometimes and calm ’er down. You’re wise by now, and young too, still, and wherever you’re headed you’ll get there. You know this and know it well.

When your spirit rises, and a breeze breaks through your spine, know it is my breath levitating and pouring blood into your heart, lighting through your eyes and burning like roman candles of the sun. Be well my son. I’m waiting for you yet. Keep on down the way.

--Your father