I found my felicity on the worst of days, and doesn’t it make annoyingly cruel sense that I’m recalling it now, moments before I die?

Six Ports was a living, breathing animal with a soul of fire for all my youth and decades before. Then I watched it slowly die, a victim of market fatigue and social decay, and my regret is that while I was younger, I never had my act together enough to enjoy its halcyon years properly. But I recently had a very intimate and honest moment with my birth city, one solitary day when it opened its sagging eyelids at the perfect time and I, equally near the end of my own rope, made contact with the old beast and we shared a sweet daydream where the past was free of all the pains that at the time had me longing for some imagined future Elysium.

I can still smell the air, clean and damp, and feel the wet snow seeping through my gloves. My ears are lulled by the pattering drip from the maples as it was just warm enough for the soft white pillows on their wide leaves to melt, and I can see the sky, lead grey and pregnant with rain, as lifelike as if it were over me now. But where my memory of that day diverges from reality is in the forested hills and silken grass field long since replaced by cookie-cutter office buildings. I prefer to recall myself in a void of comfort, blotting out the endless parking lots and homogeneous concrete squares when they dare to manifest.

That’s where my younger brother and I most often played; in the sprawling park beyond our fenced backyard where I used to lay in the grass and read on lazy summer days. And on a still January afternoon, when I felt lonely to the point of heartache over being stuck with my four-year old brother while the other kids my age were (according to my clinically depressed young mind) surely having all the fun in the world together without me, contentment settled on my shoulder when I thought it couldn’t be further away.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

My brother of course was having the time of his life, enjoying every moment he shared with his older sibling who was (and, as he said while I was faking sleep the other day, still is) his hero. I however was miserably sad, the preciousness of that moment almost completely lost on me. He hit me on the back of the head with a snowball while I was sulking and, as I was on the verge of tears, the snowball angered me and I retaliated, hitting him hard enough on the rump with return fire to make him cry, while only seconds before he’d worn the most excited and mischievous smile I’d ever seen on a human face.

He’d completely forgotten the incident by the next day, and a healthier big brother would have done as well. I however suffered, because under the scar tissue of my mental disease I was keenly aware of how much fun I should have been having, and to this day I’m burdened with guilt for having selfishly spoiled my baby brother’s joy.

I’m feeling that same guilt again over faking sleep during his visit. I could tell he was trying not to cry while he spoke to me, and I almost quit my ruse. But he came when I was deeply wallowing in that old depression and I felt just as angry at him then as when he interrupted my sulking with that snowball.

But back then I had a chance to make it up to him that very evening. I put in a video game that he particularly enjoyed watching me play and pretended he was helping me with the second controller, when in fact it was only a one-player game. And there it was, out of nowhere, the most perfect moment of my entire life.

Now I lie in agony because his wife is near-to-bursting with twins, and I don’t know if he’ll be able to make the three-hour drive to see me again before the inevitable happens.