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What’s to say about the year I spent in Fife Park? I felt like I couldn’t be hurt, but I was. I thought I had a plan, but everything was a mess. I thought there was a glow, but it doesn’t stand out like a glowing thing should.

It’s late in the spring, and I’m thinking of Fife Park. I thought I could pick up the past, and see it as I did then. But I only see it as it seems now; it was just the kind of stupid shit you’d expect a dumb kid to do, and afterwards I grew up.

I had a plan for change that year. And it was ridiculous, I knew it at the time, but I lived like it was true. I didn’t change, in the ways I thought I would. I didn’t become the person I hoped; I didn’t understand what he would be anyway.

But I did random things because they were random. I did serious things because they were serious. And I was too serious about them, and it was funny, and I laughed with myself. I was so in touch with the time, as it went by.

What an idiot idea it was to try and boil that down. The answer is there in the wholeness of it. It can’t be condensed for convenience or narrative. What I had then, that I lost, was all of it. It was a whole life, complete and constantly renewing. It was everything I was; that glow burned out of the core of me, and lit up everything I saw.

And so I have retraced my steps to the end. The truth was never anything like I remember it, and what I remember was never a feeling at all: it was a person, and I am what is left.

But I have a picture in my head of Quinn Wilde, that lost idiot youth, that fool nonpareil with the dyed red hair. I didn’t think I knew him still, but now I’ve come to know him better than before. He’s a glowing exemplar of all the ways I’d like to be. He is an aspiration. He’s pure fiction.

And now he’s shed his youth as well. The crows feet suit him well, and his eye-scar crinkles when he smiles. Like a kind of conscience, he made me restless when I threw my joy away. He brought me back, and made me look again. Now I want what he would want, much more than what I have. Now I want to live like him, much more than like myself.

And when I wonder what Quinn Wilde would do, the answer is quick and clear: he’d write a book about Fife Park, and muse about his past, and wonder what he lost, and how he changed, and if he grew.

And he would very definitely want the world to know, and he’d make his book a real thing, and he’d hold it up as if to say, ‘I am still here, we are still fine, you always were a worrier.’

And he’d maybe post a copy to you too; if you’re lucky enough to live in Fife Park.