There’s a boy.
His name is Tristan.
I’m only using his name because I know I’ll never show this poem to anyone.
Oops.
Tristan has Asperger’s syndrome.
Now, to anyone my age, that means he says annoying things at irrelevant times.
To anyone with a sibling suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome, that means he is the smartest man alive.
Today, I had a conversation with Tristan.
We spoke of suitcases and airplanes
And the rush of opening your hotel room to a safari.
I never knew it was possible but in that twenty minutes, I pitched him the earth itself in a windmill and he took his bat and swung it right back at me, and it hit me, hard, in the temple.
Then he took the earth and he stretched it out and then summed it up.
He molded it into a nail and he drilled it into my brain.
He spoke of the world as if it’s magical, because it is.
“I want to travel after high school,” I said
“Me, too,” he said.
I want to walk in the Sea of Stars and soar in the Floating Mountains and I want to outstretch my arms and scream at the top of my lungs and not worry about where I’m sleeping tonight because it’s just me and the feet I’m using to walk at the edge of the Grand Canyon.
Tristan said he wished that people would look up from their smartphones and look at the beauty of the world around them. He said the world is amazing if you could X out of that tab and go see for yourself.
He wants to start an organization that gets people out of their bad neighborhoods and takes them out to see those breath-taking wonders.
But Tristan is worried because he is bad at talking to people.
In fact, he is shaking just because we had this conversation.
You’re doing fine, Tristan. You are not as bad as you think. Some people just don’t understand like you and I do. That’s just high school. Once you get out of high school, people are a lot friendlier, I promise.
I didn’t mean it.
He said he was sorry if he was annoying me, but there is no one he can really talk to.
You’re doing fine, Tristan.
I gave him the tab off my soda can and told him to remember me when I die.
He joked and said “So does that mean I have to kill you now?”
I laughed because it was exactly Tristan, the boy with Asperger’s Syndrome that gave me life in the first place.
Just in the swing of a baseball bat, or in the pocket of a suitcase.
Just on the wing of an airplane, or in those twenty minutes.
Tristan was there.