High enough to lose.

And there is no promise to where wisdom comes from.

My next door neighbour is one of those thousands of people who walk about this city without a shirt. He works out. He is in high school, and I can not remember what his name is, though it is too late to ask again. But I do not think that he remembers mine either, because whenever he sees me he calls me "bro." Hey, what's up, bro. What's going on. Hey man, I say.The other afternoon he saw me leave my house on my bicycle to buy beers, and then saw how messy I was when I returned home. The store is three or four blocks away. Maybe I don't think that people should be walking along the sidewalk without a shirt, but maybe I realize that if anyone is going to do so, it should be someone like him and not me. 

What he seems to think of me is that I must be some smart person because I am always reading and writing on my front porch, sitting in the eye of a stormy spread of papers surrounding me. When inside, though, I am making snacks and watching films. What he does see, perhaps he connects it with a kind of wisdom I must have to share with him about the future. He asks me what I write about. I tell him that I write about questions, inked to understand how I have come to be who I am, to learn about decisions and the mix of personal and political histories and why anyone ever does anything. I tell him that I am writing things for school that are quietly about these things of my own, though for the sake of academics they are dressed in a way that is broadened into the political roles that literature has in history. He asks what my investments are in thinking so hard through everything, and tells me that he could never do that, to spend so much time with books and pens.

He is graduating from high school, and is taking time away to figure out what he wants to do. He wants to know whether this is the right decision, or if he should be going to college like most others he knows will be doing. I tell him that sometimes it can be fine to wait for something you want. Or if you are unsure whether you want it, or whether it is an unconditional desire, find the side to which you are pulled. Other things you want may not stay, but your want may stay with them. And I stop, I take my drink, and I say, well like, anyway, the way they structure school makes it to be important only if you know what you want from it. If you are in school and do not know why, then it may be best to devote some time to other things, or to figuring out why college would be what you want. He listens yet. I tell him that some time away might be very good, to wait, to let some wish scratch up an ache. You can work and make plans, but then if you know what you want then you have to do it. He is young, and maybe these are important things for a person to hear, but I am unsure whether I know how to say them in a way I believe. I tell him the things he probably should hear, things that I am not always able to mean, at least in the sense that they should be a sprout from my own experience. But I tell him, and he receives it like a kind of pearl, impregnable. And I am thinking to myself how all the things I say have a doubled meaning.

He talks to me, and I tell him these things. He leaves, and when I go back into my house I forget it all.