Throw
Pink, purple paper. Hearts over the lower case i's. Blocky handwriting slanting down to the side. Droplets of blood that trailed across the lawn from her house to his. He dropped it as he ran yelping and holding his face. I followed, I stopped. The note in the grass.
For years there was a revolving door of occupants in the house two doors down from mine. A hazy myriad of faces, some clearer than others. Just ancillary variables to the constant of he and me. Next door neighbor, closest friend. His house right of mine, separated by a brick wall easily scalable with the right momentum. His yard was an arena for the enacted whims of our imagination. Not uninhibited. Structured with arbitrary but no less vital parameters of our own design. The games we made. With roles that were hewn from the influence of cartoons and video games and grafted on to our bodies and minds. Goku, Batman, and Luke Skywalker were our patrons. Entire worlds created to live a day or two without the judgement or self-conscious guilt that would catch up a short time later. We were children then.
There were two trees in his lawn that provided low shade and bulbous roots that serpentined about the sunset rays. The wood pieces they shed made for fine weaponry. Long and straight sticks for swords and staffs. The small ones could be shucked of all but one of their lesser branches and cut down to make pistols. We kept them in a special place and claimed them. Many battles they had endured and numerous foes slain until they were inevitably broken and lost. Forgotten. At the end of his yard and mine was a steep hill and green canyon that faced right up to the woods that seemed impenetrable. Once he slid down that hill on rollerblades and broke his arm while I looked down and laughed. I could hear him moaning for help even as I knocked on his backdoor and told his dad. Not faking it, apparently.
At school he was a grade ahead. But only older by a few months. He taught as much as he played. Took medicine for ADHD and had lenient parents who described themselves as "weird". Cut from a different cloth than mine. Where I asked he answered, where he spoke I listened. What was I to him? I was the one with the swimming pool. With the swingset and Playstation and dogs. Friend for afternoons and weekends and summer breaks.
Like jungle explorers we excavated a humble circlet at the edge of the woods. The path was hidden, what little was there. Closed off and devoid of obstructing tree trunks and bushes. We called it our secret place, deigned just for us. Coveted with the kind of irrational sincerity that can only be so pure in preadolescence. But it too was lost. The last family to inhabit the house two doors down, his immediate adjacent. He let their kid see it and soon all of them knew. It was special no longer. The privacy ruined and discarded as if it was never valued at all. In anger I yelled and when their mother heard she said I couldn't go near their house or children again. Such outrage for nothing. Another rope severed at both ends.
Before them were closer days. More halcyon days, more familial. Two sisters who would become like my own. Sledding down the hill in the snow and swimming in the glistening heat that sweltered from the porch and the blacktop driveway. Blisters big as quarters on our feet. On a summer's day pool party, in my room with a game on the TV, he played show me yours with them and I looked away too late. Their yard dug up with holes and bare from the dog chained in the back, abused and neglected. A tree well fit for climbing. Ubiquitous Disney regalia steeped in their home as a way of life. When they moved the loss struck true. A vacancy of size, first of its kind. Not the last. Silence as I pass by them in the freshman hallway. Stonewall. Two more anonymous faces to wade through unattached.
They go in and out of view. Here one day and gone the next like tourists. They abide only in recollection. Each frame singular and unique; the first and last ever to exist. When they pass they're gone. Irretrievable. Only viewable from a great distance with a warped and inadequate lens. The past an incessant shadow. Always behind, always abstract. Not tactile like the present. But even that is continuously fleeting. Falling from your fingers like vapor, like dry sand into a vast and encompassing cistern. People, places, circumstances eaten up until memory is all that's left. Of what will never happen again, what is lost. The good and the bad, opaque as they are.
The minutes count down and you can't catch them. Better to stop the rainfall on an October morning. What's done is done forever. There is no going back, no yesterday to amend. The first to live two doors down was a girl. Blonde, the one feature that sticks. The rest as amorphous as oil in water. She had brothers, I remember. More than one. The type to break into your home and steal your things. Allegedly. She caught my eye. A girl, my God. When I'd never met one my own age who wasn't related. Before kindergarten fiction. An ethereal and mysterious creature. I must've been entranced. I can't recall. The surrounding and exigent details have all melted to a single sharpened point. She with him, without me. In her yard I find them. Tears, jealousy, anger. The driveway made up of loose gravel. I pick up a stone. I throw it. An audible thud, then a torrent of wailing. He runs past and I can see bleeding from his forehead. She hurries with him to his house. I walk labored. Nothing but fear and shame. Run away and hide or go home and face the hard truth. I'd rather the sky catch fire and the earth collapse from under my feet. There's a note she gave him on the ground. Bloody. No, not me. Not my aim, my strength, my pitch. Not mine.
He got stitches above his brow. Not quite dead center. A relatively minuscule incision, about the length of a finger nail, and in time its depth and redness would fade. But a mark remained there permanent. My parents were concerned, more so for me than for him. Concerned. The best and worst thing to hear a parent say. Their worries were reasoned this time. I could've killed him. Did I want to? Did there lie a taste for cruelty running in me? Or perhaps it was just the momentary and impassioned mistake of immaturity. Scarier not knowing. Common either way. And I learned the lesson. Learned it the long and burdened way. Later that night, after he'd been sewn and remedied, I was presented to him by mom and dad. Made to apologize and ensure somehow that things would go back to the comfort that ruled before, as if it were possible. But already I could see the lingering pall on their faces and the stigma within that did not erase. No house, no family, no friend to feel at total ease.
Eventually I was gone, of course. Temporary as everyone is temporary. A ten year solidarity ended with moving trucks and a new neighborhood in which to feel alien. But it was not for lack of proximity. The distance was an emotion. Apathy, reticence. Not long before we were no greater than strangers. A caravan of two exited off divergent roads. With time the accelerant. How it can gouge the hairline fracture to the broadest of canyons, the petty scrape to lethal infection. It is directional, paving and healing nothing without diligent course correction. Left to itself it builds and decays with callous impunity. Lives are joined to those precious few like leaves that stay busheled together for months and seasons after before withering and falling out When one goes so does the other. Inevitable and brief are the moments shared. By death's division or raw discord or the simple act of throwing it away, each bond has an expiration date. For everything in this world is finite and small and terminal, save one. The one who is ahead and not behind. The compass and the mirror.
For years there was a revolving door of occupants in the house two doors down from mine. A hazy myriad of faces, some clearer than others. Just ancillary variables to the constant of he and me. Next door neighbor, closest friend. His house right of mine, separated by a brick wall easily scalable with the right momentum. His yard was an arena for the enacted whims of our imagination. Not uninhibited. Structured with arbitrary but no less vital parameters of our own design. The games we made. With roles that were hewn from the influence of cartoons and video games and grafted on to our bodies and minds. Goku, Batman, and Luke Skywalker were our patrons. Entire worlds created to live a day or two without the judgement or self-conscious guilt that would catch up a short time later. We were children then.
There were two trees in his lawn that provided low shade and bulbous roots that serpentined about the sunset rays. The wood pieces they shed made for fine weaponry. Long and straight sticks for swords and staffs. The small ones could be shucked of all but one of their lesser branches and cut down to make pistols. We kept them in a special place and claimed them. Many battles they had endured and numerous foes slain until they were inevitably broken and lost. Forgotten. At the end of his yard and mine was a steep hill and green canyon that faced right up to the woods that seemed impenetrable. Once he slid down that hill on rollerblades and broke his arm while I looked down and laughed. I could hear him moaning for help even as I knocked on his backdoor and told his dad. Not faking it, apparently.
At school he was a grade ahead. But only older by a few months. He taught as much as he played. Took medicine for ADHD and had lenient parents who described themselves as "weird". Cut from a different cloth than mine. Where I asked he answered, where he spoke I listened. What was I to him? I was the one with the swimming pool. With the swingset and Playstation and dogs. Friend for afternoons and weekends and summer breaks.
Like jungle explorers we excavated a humble circlet at the edge of the woods. The path was hidden, what little was there. Closed off and devoid of obstructing tree trunks and bushes. We called it our secret place, deigned just for us. Coveted with the kind of irrational sincerity that can only be so pure in preadolescence. But it too was lost. The last family to inhabit the house two doors down, his immediate adjacent. He let their kid see it and soon all of them knew. It was special no longer. The privacy ruined and discarded as if it was never valued at all. In anger I yelled and when their mother heard she said I couldn't go near their house or children again. Such outrage for nothing. Another rope severed at both ends.
Before them were closer days. More halcyon days, more familial. Two sisters who would become like my own. Sledding down the hill in the snow and swimming in the glistening heat that sweltered from the porch and the blacktop driveway. Blisters big as quarters on our feet. On a summer's day pool party, in my room with a game on the TV, he played show me yours with them and I looked away too late. Their yard dug up with holes and bare from the dog chained in the back, abused and neglected. A tree well fit for climbing. Ubiquitous Disney regalia steeped in their home as a way of life. When they moved the loss struck true. A vacancy of size, first of its kind. Not the last. Silence as I pass by them in the freshman hallway. Stonewall. Two more anonymous faces to wade through unattached.
They go in and out of view. Here one day and gone the next like tourists. They abide only in recollection. Each frame singular and unique; the first and last ever to exist. When they pass they're gone. Irretrievable. Only viewable from a great distance with a warped and inadequate lens. The past an incessant shadow. Always behind, always abstract. Not tactile like the present. But even that is continuously fleeting. Falling from your fingers like vapor, like dry sand into a vast and encompassing cistern. People, places, circumstances eaten up until memory is all that's left. Of what will never happen again, what is lost. The good and the bad, opaque as they are.
The minutes count down and you can't catch them. Better to stop the rainfall on an October morning. What's done is done forever. There is no going back, no yesterday to amend. The first to live two doors down was a girl. Blonde, the one feature that sticks. The rest as amorphous as oil in water. She had brothers, I remember. More than one. The type to break into your home and steal your things. Allegedly. She caught my eye. A girl, my God. When I'd never met one my own age who wasn't related. Before kindergarten fiction. An ethereal and mysterious creature. I must've been entranced. I can't recall. The surrounding and exigent details have all melted to a single sharpened point. She with him, without me. In her yard I find them. Tears, jealousy, anger. The driveway made up of loose gravel. I pick up a stone. I throw it. An audible thud, then a torrent of wailing. He runs past and I can see bleeding from his forehead. She hurries with him to his house. I walk labored. Nothing but fear and shame. Run away and hide or go home and face the hard truth. I'd rather the sky catch fire and the earth collapse from under my feet. There's a note she gave him on the ground. Bloody. No, not me. Not my aim, my strength, my pitch. Not mine.
He got stitches above his brow. Not quite dead center. A relatively minuscule incision, about the length of a finger nail, and in time its depth and redness would fade. But a mark remained there permanent. My parents were concerned, more so for me than for him. Concerned. The best and worst thing to hear a parent say. Their worries were reasoned this time. I could've killed him. Did I want to? Did there lie a taste for cruelty running in me? Or perhaps it was just the momentary and impassioned mistake of immaturity. Scarier not knowing. Common either way. And I learned the lesson. Learned it the long and burdened way. Later that night, after he'd been sewn and remedied, I was presented to him by mom and dad. Made to apologize and ensure somehow that things would go back to the comfort that ruled before, as if it were possible. But already I could see the lingering pall on their faces and the stigma within that did not erase. No house, no family, no friend to feel at total ease.
Eventually I was gone, of course. Temporary as everyone is temporary. A ten year solidarity ended with moving trucks and a new neighborhood in which to feel alien. But it was not for lack of proximity. The distance was an emotion. Apathy, reticence. Not long before we were no greater than strangers. A caravan of two exited off divergent roads. With time the accelerant. How it can gouge the hairline fracture to the broadest of canyons, the petty scrape to lethal infection. It is directional, paving and healing nothing without diligent course correction. Left to itself it builds and decays with callous impunity. Lives are joined to those precious few like leaves that stay busheled together for months and seasons after before withering and falling out When one goes so does the other. Inevitable and brief are the moments shared. By death's division or raw discord or the simple act of throwing it away, each bond has an expiration date. For everything in this world is finite and small and terminal, save one. The one who is ahead and not behind. The compass and the mirror.
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