• Seated upon the curb, wind ruffling our hair and laughter running on its own accord, pinwheeling off into the atmosphere and our presence caused the destruction of earth but you couldn’t have found the sound of caring anywhere near us.

    What were we doing there?

    Looking back at the tea-stained, sepia tones of those memories, those happy, happy memories, I can’t recall our purpose. What we hoped to accomplish with the scientific duo of oil plus oil--did they ever mix? A like affinity for bells and braces gleaming silver and turquoise rubber bands, blackheads on your nose and whiteheads on my chin, small and gangly and one of us packed some weight but now I can’t remember which of us it was.

    You had a purple bandanna to keep back the hair from your eyes, you said, but I knew it was because of some band, some singer, some half-hearted-serious affinity towards something to make you cool. Did I ever tell you you were so uncool you meant the world to me? I never needed someone hip to the latest fashion, the latest catch phrase, the sunburnt aura of a timely demise.

    You were none of those things but a being superseding them all.

    My temporary best friend, that summer, but the one who made the deepest impact upon my soul.

    Even today, there remain the things I learned from you. I hold my chopsticks with an efficient limp form, I turn a circle before the mirror in the vain attempt to catch a whole glimpse of my backside in jeans, and I catch bumblebees on my bare palm, their legs spidering across my fingers before they take flight and people gaze upon me with awe.

    I can recall the memory of you pushing me into a railing with unmindful careless vengeance, and I can recall when your sister caught you with a hand where it didn't belong at a family picnic.

    But when I think as hard as I can, dredging the murkiest depths of fruitless memory, I cannot recall that first moment one of us kissed the other. Did you start it, that oversweet, ripened romance? Start it with a kiss, a mashing of lip and brace metal, clumsy and the most heartfelt. Or did I begin the cycle of events? Look you in the eye just one time too many, a growing blush and your knowing smirk and I’d pulled your ear and kissed your mouth and it was begun?

    I’m not sure anymore how it started, nor it’s pittering end. It was just…done, by the turn of fall and another grade higher.

    I recall losing my braces, finally, just past Halloween the following year, and kissing someone, but the face is gone with the name and somehow, when I try, I can only smell the acrid smell of antibacterial cream and bandaids on split skin, a lemonistic powdery sense of unmade lemonade soaking into the pores of the tongue.

    When I hear the words ‘puppy love’, I think of that summer, and you. And although I can’t recall our ages, our particular strengths, I know that you made me happy, seated upon the curb, wind ruffling our hair and laughter running on its own accord.