I don't think I've ever had friends, the way most people think of the word, just brothers. Just a few; chosen by the accidents of my non-intentions and solidified over time through what some would call, well, luck. Fewer than what you could count on your hands, they have become so important in as many years as those hands could count. They have each earned their own chapters in the story of my life, bleeding into one another's as we grew together, as I have earned the right to call them brothers. They are the foundation and shoring up I have come to rely upon, much as I hope I have become for them.

Colin Gee, Arnold Arboretum, Boston, circa 2009. Courtesy of Will Faraci.

Colin and I met, like almost all the boys, under benign but auspicious circumstances. Transplants, in a new city on short notice, venturing into a new part of life we didn't know we didn't quite understand just yet. Smoking cigarettes outside of The New England School of Photography only a few weeks into the program, one of us piped up. The silence that exists between young men who don't yet know each other, shuffling around in their own awkwardness finding the confidence to meet new people for the first time since childhood, had been broken, and our friendship started. The conversation revealed we had the same birthday--down to the year--and discovered, very quickly, we were very much the same troublemakers. Older brothers, the sons of doctors, night owls and late sleepers; we quickly settled into our friendship.

Friendship grows into brotherhood incrementally through the monotony of a common interest, time shared chipping away at the tasks at hand and the procrastination of completing them, together. The surface of our differences eroded were with each day spent together until the depths of our similarities were raw and revealed to be the foundation our brotherhood is built upon. Our time at NESOP, the nights sharing cheap beer endlessly watching new era cartoons, hours skateboarding instead of doing schoolwork, dropping everything to get each other to or from the hospital far too many times, planning and cooking joint birthday whole pig roasts, standing together in the sideways rain of a cold Wyoming night that deserves (and will get) it's own story--that, is how we became brothers.

In the summer of 2011, I left Boston, MA early in the morning under circumstances that have been lost to time. I was headed out West. West of the Mississippi, with a stay in Nebraska and a turn in Wyoming. I can remember ripping through western Pennsylvania, flying over the soaring mountains of the Alleghenies, topping out at the red end of both the tachometer and speedometer. Stupid, in hindsight, but I was excited as all Hell. A night in Ohio, then Iowa, and a short ride until I was as at a gas station outside Lincoln, NE. Colin met me in his beloved Land Cruiser, beat up and befitting him if you know him as I do. Lead through the suburbs of Lincoln, I followed his tan junk heap to 8043 N. Shore Drive. Four more days in Lincoln and I counted myself a lucky man.

Jo, Terry and Connor (Colin's younger brother) were there to meet Colin's odd friend who traveled 1600 miles with open doors and a hospitality you can only, and rightfully, describe as MidWestern. I was beat and they were wonderful. I had my own bed, bathroom and all the food they could offer. Colin and I were in the same place again, months after he went home to be with his ailing Father, ready to have the same old fun in a new way, in a new place. I met all the faces that were just names for years, people that were once only stories materialized, and we trampled all over Lincoln making stories of our own. I remember floating through it all, free and untied from the regularities I left in Boston. There was a pause in time, an ethereal excitement that transformed only a few days into what felt like a few weeks, and I can remember reveling in the oppressive heat of our elongated nights, Colin and I rousing about, his old friends and my new ones in tow. The rolls of film I shot throughout this trip, spending years undeveloped and moved from one apartment to the next, to this day remain largely undiscovered in negative storage boxes; they are still waiting to be reconstituted, one of the few things from this trip that isn't just a memory. They will be a complement to bolster the movies in my mind that have slowed into snapshots, the finer details of having been there concentrated into single images that take me right back. That is, for sure, something to come back to another day.

It makes me wish I had a standalone memory, one that was concrete and certain, chronological, so far as memory can be. I don't, though. I think referentially, laterally and rely on the context of my free floating thoughts and those of my brothers when we are together. I often feel like I've lost so many of these memories, with a twinge of heartbreak, because I can't recite them encyclopedically. It's a bit scary, making me question my faculties: had I not been there, wishing I was somewhere else? Did I blur the recording, or maybe mistreat the archives, with what I've done to myself? Or is this just what happens; you don't forget, you begin not to remember. But then I drift, or talk, and it begins to crop up. Like summarizing your childhood or a decade of your life, the beacons are distant, dim. The important things start to appear and they shine brighter the longer I spend with them, their light illuminates the space, the story, around them, the details and nuances becoming clearer. Eventually, navigating becomes fluid and I can begin to see how it's all related, distant but connected. I keep drifting, my concerns subdued for now. And then there comes a moment, not all that often, when my focus turns away from trying to remember and finds it's way to discovering these memories and I try to be grateful. Were I able to recall every moment--every bar, the drive out of Lincoln to the shooting range, drunken burritos in children's playgrounds, grilling in the heat for dinner with the neighbors, fishing, well, with a remarkable lack of skill, the strange circumstances that brought me to tramp around the campground on the outskirts of town in only my briefs and go swimming in the darkness--I guess I would miss the excitement in reliving, rediscovering each story, every time I get to tell it.

There are, of course, certain experiences that live outside of a cartographic memory. They seem to stand alone and, because of their importance, reverent. The platitudes that so often describe these encounters and the people within them can be fitting, but belie the sincerity intertwined. I try not to fall into 'speechwriting' about things I hold in this esteem, as much to challenge myself to find the words as to pay the deserved respect. The moment that stands apart from the rest of this expedition is better described as a rolling collection of comments and conversations with Colin's Dad, Terry.

We sat, for most of the time, in silence. I have been there many times before, waiting quietly for a man from a generation (or two) before me to say something I could catch and throw back. I know now, not only with Terry, that I waited because I wanted to sound pensive and particular, choosing my words carefully so that I would be seen wise for my age or insightful for my lack thereof; I'm sure I sounded exactly like I was trying for that effect. Despite my greatest efforts to be abnormal, Terry was remarkably normal. He found small things to chat about, the television series he and Jo were watching, while she and Connor were arguing upstairs, interrupting himself to roll his eyes like this was the moment he would need to intervene. He was like any father of boys in that sense. Normal, in every way except for his pauses, when he seemed to be searching for the ability to say the words or sometimes, when he was searching for the thought that wasn't there anymore; my silence here was patient and genuine. We found our way into this rhythm and it swung between idle and idol conversation, from television to the honest feeling that follows an eye rolling. This was the definition of our relationship, spanning the mornings and afternoons between consoling a hangover and searching for another one, and I don't hesitate to say we both knew, this is the entirety of what it would be.

The conversations Terry and I had are dear. I may not remember every word, but I also don't necessarily want to give away the ones I do; they are moments we shared and it feels right to keep them that way. We spent much of our time together at breakfast--before Colin was awake, Jo and Connor hashing it out in another room the way Moms and teenagers do--finding the balance between small talk and breeching the chasm that exists between your son's brother and your brother's sick father. I learned a tremendous amount from the mornings around the kitchen table with a man facing his own end, a father saying goodbye to his young sons and a husband whose wife would soon lose him; I heard stories of his life, saw the expressions of a frustrated man, watched him laugh and make his family laugh, and came to understand Colin that much more. I am certainly on the peripheral of people affected by Terry, and I very much was, and I wouldn't miss an opportunity to elaborate--everything I saw in that household during that summer proved Terry was an exponentially larger and more loved figure in the lives of his sons and his wife than someone lucky to have known him for no more than four days could express.

I had traveled a long way to meet my brother's father, to meet the man for myself and to do so knowing I would probably never see him again. In some respect, I would like to think he had a small sense of each reason I was there. I tell myself he did and occasionally it will surface in rambling discussions with Colin; in so many words, carried by his tone or mood, I will be consoled on that though, strange as it is to be consoled by a son who's father is dead. I'll be reminded that it's not just about the thoughts of the dead, or my own, but what those thoughts mean to his family left behind. If I can tell myself anything, I can say that Colin knew why I was there.

Four days is not enough time to get to know a man, but it is long enough to get to know what that man means to his family. It didn't take long to see his affect, how his sons looked just like him, the ways in which he was their father and husband. That much was clear. The tumor in his brain was sporadically taking away his ability to deliver one liners in time, but gave each sentence a poignance we hung on, that I hung on to, with the respect and anticipation his present and former self surely deserved. I don't know, I am still at a bit of a loss even years later, how to describe the fortune I was given, having known Terry Gee in the small way I did.

I left Lincoln after only a few days. Tired and antsy to continue out West, I still wished I was there for another day. This trip had been driven by a particularly intangible search, one I still can't describe well and have attempted again since. I went out to discover something deeper, to just get it, like the road and the time hovering above it would just present it to me. Wishing for another day only continued that search; I remember thinking that if I spent that day more focused on Colin and Terry with each other and the rest of the family, I would uncover something more profound. But I didn't get that extra day, and even if I did I don't think it would have given me anything more than the four days previous. I would have spent the time looking for something that I couldn't articulate, waiting for it to come out and strike me, instead of being present and enjoying the moment. I would have been disappointed during and after the fact, having not made that great discovery, leaving Lincoln with a melancholy that would have tainted the extraordinary time I did have. Instead, I packed up my gear and readied the bike. I started to get excited about Wyoming, how far away it was and how equally unknown. Colin would leave after me, driving with friends, and get there before me to set up camp. With little fanfare but a tremendous gratitude, I gave my thanks, hugs and handshakes and said farewell to Connor, Jo and Terry.

I realize in hindsight, I should have modeled my approach for the rest of the trip after those four days in Lincoln. Enjoying what you are doing, at that time and in that place, is the way to discover something deeper, to just get it. But you don't discover it then. You don't discover it the day after or even when you get back home. You begin to discover things about it as you sit with it, as the clarity of all the details begin to tarnish and the enormity of it becomes manageable. I was looking for an answer while on the road, disappointed that it wasn't presented to me, that I didn't find it. To be sure, I look back on this road trip with a grand fondness, but it will always carry a vascular nonfulfillment. The reprieve in Lincoln does not have any of this conflict in memory. My understanding of what it meant, of lessons learned and the value of that time, has come with a long term processing; only after creating these memories, only in the years afterwards--the remembering, the retelling, the reliving of these few days--have I been able to reflect so well on having been there and know what it all meant.

Colin has been a brother for years now; I can say without hesitation, 'so have I.' We were lucky to have met, to be sure, but stubborn, determined, to be there in all the ways possible that have allowed us to grow into brotherhood. I speak of my friends, my brothers, with such lofty descriptions because even after years of berating, mocking and joyous torture, we know what underlies these innocuous spats. We are there for one another in all the ways we recognize as much as the ones we don't. We understand it and each other in a way maybe only brothers can.

Terry died in November of 2011, only a few months after I met the man. Colin was there with his family and though I wish I could have been there for him, I'm glad he was there for his family.

Colin and I will bike the Metric Century Ride for the Brain Tumor Society, in honor of Terry, for the second time on Sunday, 17 May. If you would like to help support, please donate here.