I.
We lie side-by-side in the grass, trying to trace constellations in the sky. From behind, the dim light from your house illuminated the trees that surrounded your backyard. Crickets, or some other type of insect, made a constant clicking sound somewhere off in the woods. It was dark. I worried your parents would get suspicious.
"Don't worry," you said, "they know we're just friends."
We fell silent for a few moments. Our breath made hazy clouds above our heads, barely visible against the dark sky. I snuck a look out of the corner of my eye. With both hands under your head, you physically embodied that relaxed, effortless demeanor I always admired about you, but the unblinking look you gave the sky gave away deep, churning thoughts. It sent a chill down my spine.
"Are you cold?" you asked, and automatically took off your worn-in college sweatshirt to give to me.
I was, a little, but the sweatshirt didn't help much against the cold. It was more comforting than it was warm; it smelled like you.
II.
You always wore mismatched socks. The first time you took off your shoes, revealing the right sock with blue and green stripes and the left sock with ducks, I was more shocked than amused.
“Come on,” you told me with a smile, “lighten up.”
I wondered what the point to wearing socks that didn’t match was.
“Well,” you retorted, “what’s the point of wearing socks that do match?”
From then on, we wore mismatched socks together. Sometime during the day, we would find each other. On the count of two (we did everything on the count of two; we could never wait until three), we took off our shoes and laughed at the ridiculousness of our socks.
Before we left each other, we traded a sock. I don’t remember how that tradition came about, nor do I remember how we both got over how unsanitary it was. Your foot was bigger than mine and I walked around for the rest of the day with too much sock in my shoe.
The excitement of wearing mismatched socks was that there was this whole part to me that a person couldn’t see. It was like a secret. I could go completely wild with my socks, and no one, but you, would have seen them.
My mom did the laundry for me the other day.
Lying on top were nine socks too big for my feet, and not a matching pair among them.
III.
I remember the first time I ever saw your handwriting. Scribbled across a pink Post-it note stuck haphazardly on my locker were the words,
“Have a meeting after school—meet me here at 4? Sorry for asking you to wait.”
Your initial sat nonchalantly at the bottom of the note, as if I were expected to know who wrote it from that single letter.
In all honesty, it wasn’t the initial so much as it was a combination of everything else: the memory of you needing some Post-its and teasing you by giving you a pink pack; the fact that we had picked up the routine of walking home together after school; the handwriting that I knew couldn’t belong to anyone else.
It was such a reflection of your personality. The dot of the lowercase i’s floated a few lines above the rest of the letters. Your t’s tilted to the right, anticipating and wanting to lean on the next letter. The tail of the y swooped beneath the other letters to catch them if they fell.
But all those observations came to my mind later.
I read the pink note again and plucked it off my locker. Folded in half twice and then tucked into my coat pocket, the comfort of your words carried me until 4PM, when I substituted your words for your company. But all I could think about was though you were busy, you still wanted to walk me home.
IV.
We went to the beach. It was one of those gray, “winter on the cusp of spring” days—still relatively cold—and we had it all to ourselves. Out of a plastic shopping bag that held our lunch and a “Thank You, Have a Nice Day” printed on the front, you produced a red Frisbee.
“You up for it?” you asked, challenging me with a glint in your eyes and a mischievous grin.
You put the bag down where the grass meets the sand. We stuffed our socks in our shoes. I knew you were taking it easy on me when we started to play, but you were so excited and happy for me the first time I caught the Frisbee, and I didn’t want to ruin it for you.
When the hunger set in, we sat down where the sand meets the grass.
Somewhere off in the distance, a seagull cawed.
Perhaps I thought I needed that boost of confidence that comes with new things, because that morning, I used a new shampoo. I caught whiffs of the apricot and grapefruit medley as erratic breezes blew my hair around.
I’ve been told that of all the senses, smell is the one most closely linked to memory. Every time I wash my hair and the scent of the familiar apricot and grapefruit mix engulfs the shower, I feel the sand between my toes, I smell the saltwater breeze, I hear the surge of the waves onto the beach.
Sand is one of those things that will never disappear. You still discover it in the strangest places even days after going to the beach—a constant reminder of the day you spent there.
It took me forever to rid of all of it, but for once, I didn’t mind.
V.
The beauty of memories is that something you’ve experienced, however long ago it may have been, still exists somewhere – that there is a point to everything you’ve done. Memories link between the past and the present, forging a bridge between what was and what is.
But the thing is that you’re going to think about them however you want to think about them, because you remember things how you want to remember things. Memories aren’t perfect.
Often we spend our lives chasing after a single moment, one small experience that changed our lives, because we want to feel those same emotions, those same feelings. But since then, we’ve changed, and it’s impossible to recreate that moment, relive that experience, or feel that comfort in the same relationship.
More often than we realize, we cling to the hope that we don’t change, that things are still the same. After a while, we become so comfortable with what things were that we don’t realize what things are. We cling and grasp onto the other person – onto the hope that we’re still desired. But what we don’t realize often enough is that things change. People change. And as much as we wish, will, or hope otherwise, there’s nothing to stop it.
VI.
There’s something almost painfully alive about being awake at three in the morning. Maybe it has something to do with the chemicals in your brain, like maybe that’s when the adrenaline kicks in and you fully realize that you’re doing something really absurd.
At three in the morning, it’s possible to pause for a pretty long stretch of time and not hear a single thing: not a single car passing or a siren or any loud neighbors. You’re the only one awake on your block, and maybe even on your street.
It seems almost a different world at three in the morning. It seems as if the orange glow of the street lamps, the quiet neighborhood—it seems as if that were the way it should be, as if the world were frozen and you were the only one allowed to move around.
And everything that night you see with some blurry gaze, but at some moment around three o’clock in the morning, you pause for a minute from whatever you’re doing and realize how silent it is. And you peek between two white, plastic blinds onto the orange-bathed world, and you’re hit with a moment of clarity. Everything sharpens, and you realize you’re still awake in a world that seems devoid of life.
And there’s something painfully alive about that, as if you were living more on the edge, more dangerously, taking advantage of every moment given. And after this moment, after seeing the world like a still-frame from a movie… at some point, you pull your hand back from the white blinds and they flicker back into place, and at some point, you allow yourself to sleep.
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