Not everyone got to ride back home from college

carrying a fish in a plastic peanut jar

while the driver sang Toad the Wet Sprocket songs

loudly and badly

under skies so unscrupulously blue that

the clouds looked painted on.

Weren’t you lucky,

you said,

that I was driving home that weekend,

that we could carpool in my heartbreak red

Mercury Topaz,

sunglasses on, windows rolled down,

chain smoking cigarettes like we’d never run out.

The fish you carried

lived in a trifle bowl for weeks

before being transported back to college,

the peanut jar buckled into the passenger seat.

You caught a ride back with your brother, or parents,

I can’t remember now. The next time I saw you,

maybe we had lunch. I can’t remember that now, either.

Instead I remember

the drive with the fish,

smoking at the picnic table outside my dorm,

your new paintings,

the night I passed out drunk on your sofa,

and playing kickball in elementary school.

The fish eventually died, and I buried it in an empty cigarette box

beneath the manicured lawn behind my dorm.

You lived longer than the fish at least.

And I have lived longer than you.

And I remember that drive better than I remember the fish,

the color and size and type all forgotten now,

just the car speakers turned up as loud as they could go,

the cigarette ash flying out the windows

like foam from a distant shore.