pee along the side of an interstate. go to new orleans. put another picture of your naked body on the internet with your face exposed. stalk a random stranger for a few days. trespass. find something old and broken and fix it or make it beautiful again. fuck someone you love without a condom or birth control and secretly wonder what it would be like to have a baby. visit a graveyard, the oldest one in your town; find the oldest grave. put something there. say the name on the grave out loud. remember the name of a kid in your class who died when you were growing up. remember something you did together.

(me, it was luke heltemus. he was one of them, anyway. he died of a brain aneurism in high school, over summer break, while i was in cape cod, mass, my mother told me, because his mother had called her to tell her. he played right field and he was always smiling. he would have grown up to be a pretty decent man, because he was decent in high school, where it’s so easy to be mean and awful. but he never was. not once.

we played baseball together. when i go home, i think i’ll leave something there for him. because i didn’t get to go to his funeral. because i never went to his grave because for so long i was always afraid of death. i think i will leave him a baseball.)