Streetlights

In our youth, we ran through open fields catching lightning bugs in bottles, using its light to carry us through the tall grass. Barefoot, we walked down Palmetto Street as the coastal pines softened the blacktop with fallen needles. We washed ourselves with the garden hose, its faded yellow paint peeling onto our hands.

I remember nights sitting against the brick wall at the 711, tracing the patterns on my back with my finger and wondering how long they’d stay. Our voices faded in and out of silence as passing headlights flooded our hands in white and gold.

We ran miles through that neighborhood, our shoes wrapped in duct tape to cover the holes we’d torn. Even under the night sky, the heavy summer air of Tidewater coated our bodies in sweat. Your muscles shimmered in the humidity as you passed me, your skin painted orange under the streetlights.

We wore hand-me-downs, baggy white tees and loose chains passed down from our fathers and brothers. Our shirts billowed from gusts of wind off the coast, riding beach cruisers rusted from years of sea air. We stood up on our pedals to look out over the 1st Street jetty, watching the tide break against the coast in an endless cycle. I wondered if our skinny arms were enough to support the weight we carried; all the weight we inherited from our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. Riding home, I blinked through the sweat stinging my eyes, wiping away blindness like the dirt on my knees.

I remember the way your father spoke, meandering over words like he was interrogating their use. Working the door at a Norfolk club on weekends, he’d get home late with a group of friends, new and old. The kitchen and back porch filled with Olde English and smoke, cicadas blending with voices and guitars. It was the first time I heard the twang of a Fender Stratocaster, carrying sounds from the Mississippi Delta to the Virginia coast. We sat on the back steps watching the faces float in and out all throughout our youth; watching lighters spark and bottles glisten under table lamps and wicker fans, finding glimpses of past and peace in the Southern moonlight.

Your dad told us stories about playing ball in the August heat. Strapping on pads for the first time, he passed on words and wisdom he heard through his own helmet all those years ago in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Gliding across the turf in high school, I’d remember the way he described the dew soaked through his cleats and sprayed his legs. How he described cutting into the open field, floodlights reaching into the canopy to illuminate the grass: “Like I was floating.”

I remember locking eyes, how slight shifts in our expressions meant everything to what we said. It’s a connection I haven’t known sense; something that can only form with the friend who grew up by your side. It’s what hurt most when I picked up the phone and heard your dad on the other line; the feeling of certainty that you were dead.

The last time together, we were 17. You told me about a dream you’d had, laying in the water, staring into the blue. Your back was covered in a web of scars and bruises. You painted a mosaic that covered your body, finding beauty in all its distortions. Contrasts between wounded and healed. You said that blood leaked from your body. It stretched across the world, filling the oceans.

Looking back, it feels like the tangible pieces of memory that defined me have faded. Things I saw hazed over, voices I heard blended together; faces I knew blurred with time. Memory felt fixed, carved into my identity.

I’ve tried to think differently about how I see memory, my perception of the past shifting as I move forward. Its impressions feel bodiless; ethereal streams of thought flowing through me like the waves I watched in my youth.

I think about the past and what remains. The things still living in their original form exist as echoes from lost corners of childhood. Nebulous recollections, the way sunlight danced across chain-link fences and passed through Magnolia leaves, have painted me a way forward.

I’ve tried to find ways to tell you I remember, hoping that writing would cover the ground that words couldn’t. I remember moonlight reflecting off the water, Zippo lighters and halogen lamps outlining silhouettes on the beach. Toothy smiles and turf burns and heat lightning over the bay.

I remember dreaming of Palmetto, returning home. We laid in the road as the streetlights painted our bodies orange one last time, just how it was in our youth. Hanging over us were the shoes you threw on the power lines long ago. I wanted to believe that they’d be there forever; to guide our way home when the streetlights burn out, when the cicadas drown out the world around us.