I want to kiss you so fiercely that I finally understand the depth at which I fall and the height at which you rise. I will meet you again, even still —in the center of it all ("Like a ring."); the two of us caught in a tangled mass of scarlet cord, wound and knotted so tightly around us that I almost feel indistinguishable from you. ("Two bodies, two lives, one soul.") I can feel all that red humming and chanting beneath my ribcage like a war song, running through my veins to deliver to my heart a desperate echo of longing.

I’ve been saying, “tomorrow,” for the last three months, dreaming again in a bent and hollow sort of way, shoving myself into all of my crooked corners. I’ve purposely avoided it up to now, trying to dodge it, like an expert lightning runner —my sad attempts to slip unnoticed past the inevitable summer months.

It denies my wishes for a moderate temperature and ruthlessly tortures me with its slow crawl in my direction, wrapping its clammy hands around my throat to pin me to hot pavement; sparks within me and kindles unkempt fires, burns me at the shoulders like Memorial Day fireworks —feels so potent I can almost see it tucked behind the horizon. Waiting.

I want to taste a sky that slowly darkens, bowing its graceful head to welcome a storm that may never come, existing only to fool me into praying another day for rain.

It is almost sunset but it is still too hot. She sits next to me and passes over a mason jar of crushed ice and lemonade and I take it gratefully into my hands. Instead of drinking it, I rest it against my forehead and allow the condensation from the glass to drip down the sides of my face with closed eyes. I take more of it with my fingers to drench the back of my neck, but my palms burn more for it. When I sigh because this small jar does not alleviate my apparent and immediate threat of heat stroke, she laughs at me.

She is my best friend. There was a never conscious moment that I made that decision, it just happened. Before she'd joined me on her concrete stoop I'd been turning over the idea of whether or not there was an exact moment that I'd perceived her differently, but could not pinpoint it. I’d been eyeing the patches of dirt and dead grass scattered within her yard, listening to her hum If I Ain't Got You out of tune, mumbling some of the more repetitive words here and there, picking out the sounds of her fetching things as she sets them on the counters of her run down kitchen. I try to guess what she is doing as I am hearing it, but feel unwilling to join her. It is even hotter inside her house since her air-conditioner is broken. We are devastated.

After a moment of silence she narrows her eyes against the sun tells me that she misses him. I nod, but say nothing. Three of us sat here last year and suddenly the heaviness of his absence rests between us. She quickly changes the subject and tells me she wants to start jogging because when school comes back around she’ll be thin, for sure. “I’m going to be so ****, I’m not even joking.” I smile at her determination. She talks about a girl in our year that everyone calls pretty, but I shrug. She asks if I think she is pretty. I can only nod my head. I can’t compliment her properly because I haven’t found the right words to tell her that it’s not about being thin. That is not what makes her perfect. Not to me.

I never liked her lemonade, but I begin to drink it anyway, thankful that some of the ice has melted fast enough to be a bit watered down. I don’t mind. It made it less sugary. The first time she’d given me lemonade, her father had laughed and said, “If you eat the ice, it’s like a dessert,” not knowing that dessert was literally the last thing I ever wanted. I have never been fond of sweets.

She laughs a little and crunches away on her ice and I cringe. She knows I think it’s an awful sound, but I’d grown so accustomed to it after the years of hearing it. For her, it was a typical summer treat. It wasn’t even real lemonade. In her freezer were small cylinders of an odd, condensed yellow mush that they’d dump into a plastic pitcher and then add water to. Remembering this, I no longer feel like drinking it. I hand it to her.

“Don’t want it?” she asks. I shake my head, watching neighbor girls sit under a tree with a small dollhouse as I wait for her to finish both jars. I don’t like the way it leaves the back of my throat feeling dry anyway and I never feel less thirsty after drinking it. She sets the empty jars between us and we talk about where we’ll go this summer, what movies we’ll see —lamenting that there really haven’t been any good ones recently and that maybe it’d be way more fun to see if we could convince her parents to let her join my family at the lake house. She doesn’t want to swim at all but seems excited to lay on the dock and get a bit of color.

She wants to take pictures. She rises from the stoop to return the jars to her kitchen sink and grab her camera and we walk through her neighborhood. I trail behind her consciously as she raises it to her eye, letting my fingers run along her neighbor’s chain-link fences, dreading the moment she finds a way to somehow sneak me into the frames of her photographs. She’s seemed more eager to try and capture me now that I am taller. I have grown so much in just a few months that I’m not sure how to handle my limbs just yet. They are too long and too thin and I am strangely aware of them —but even more aware of where she points her lens.

We find out that there is construction behind her neighborhood and sneak past the half constructed fences, large barricades, and signs (Keep Out, Construction Ahead). It is an odd place for nicer houses, we decide —right next to the ghetto. She laughs at the brick wall and shakes her head. “That’s not going to keep them out.” But it looks intimidating anyway. Maybe that’s the point.

In the middle of the area rests newly planted trees shading a small, wooden gazebo. They overlook a manmade pond, just large enough to swim in. She knows me too well. My first instinct is to jump in so she dares me to. Practicing self-restraint I tell her all I want is the shade and I lean against the railing of the gazebo instead. I watch her snap more photos —of leaves, of ripples, of her feet, the construction. She asks again if I want to join her and shrugs at my reluctance. She dips short legs in the water and casts a teasing glance in my direction. Her pink hair looks silly against her warm face and I smile. She tells me she knows I want to, that I’m a *****. I shake my head. She draws it out mockingly and threatens to take a picture. (I cover my face with my hand.) “Paaaaansssyyyyy.” She laughs and tells me to just get in. “You gunna just take that?” I was a lot less eager to break rules, but no. I wasn’t going to just ‘take that.’

So I jump in, glad to be cool. The momentary weightlessness frees me for just a small space of time. I feel it cling to my skin when I surface, but my clothes make me feel twice as heavy. I want all of my thoughts to feel the way your body does underwater. Light. Careless. Far away.

Suddenly, behind us, someone is shouting at us in an indistinguishable accent. We trade horrified glances, swearing we catch the word cops, and we bolt, leaving a frantic trail of water and wet foot prints to evaporate behind us. We don’t stop running until we get back to her porch, the sun fully set, and we collapse against her concrete stoop out of breath, laughing much harder than we should. “Oh my god,” she repeats over and over again with exasperated giggles and small gasps for air. My heart cannot be tamed, like it's run ahead of me. I’m sure I won’t be able to find it for a while.

“Oh my god...” She tells me she doesn’t want to run anymore and I cast her a confused glance and tell her we’re definitely in the clear, but she shakes her head. “No, I mean all summer. Forget being thin,” she says. Suddenly I feel her in that missing section of my chest. “Who wants to run in this heat?”

His dead wife used to spit. He tells me this on a hot July day on his porch. “Yeah, a whole fifteen feet,” he boasts. He’ll laugh, but I am noticing his large golden cat with her eyes half closed, dreaming in the summer heat behind the open screened windows of his old house.

He collects newspapers, and they lay in yellowed stacks that I can see beyond his open door within the stillness, still ******* with thick cord. Some of them rustle lightly at the corners, swaying up and down as his electric fan rotates this way and that. I momentarily question how fragile they’ve become with age against the hum of blown summer air, but his slow almost-southern-drawl takes me back in and I shield my eyes from the sun with my arm, keys in my left hand, sweat at the back of my neck.

The roof and trees have offered limited shade, and I’ve leaned against the side of the concrete steps to feel the coolness of the bricks against my knee. I’ve meant to go for an hour now, but he keeps me here with a, “Hey, y’know—” and another story will follow.

About his son sometimes, who he always says is also his best friend. I’ve never met him. He’s like a ghost of someone I think I could know but he remains unnamed and I have never questioned it. He’ll continue on —how he wants a new dog but he doesn’t know how his tired self would keep up with a little pup, and his fat old cat —oh, could I feed her this Friday and Saturday? “I might go out and see my son.”

I say that I will with a small pang of jealousy. She curls around my legs in her eagerness, unaware of her master’s weekend absences, purring at her first few bites of small, orange fish-shaped kibble.

When he is tired and doesn’t feel like driving he’ll take the city bus out for his errands and call me with his “cell-you-lar” to see if I can pick him up. “If it’s no trouble,” he says. It isn’t. I’ve taken him home on several other occasions.

His thank yous are quiet, but I feel them anyway. He is nothing like my father but some part of me hopes that when he looks at me he is seeing his son just as much as I am seeing all the years of neglect and false hope all wrapped up in this lonely man.

I put on your old watch. "Like father like son." ( —Not quite.) It is too big. I took a few links out but I'm leaner. All of the windows are open and the quiet fragments of unasked questions linger. I think I lost them in the newly occupied rooms of houses strangers now call home. Like an attic with limited storage space, I arrogantly discarded the opportunity to inherit your more worldly possessions —as though I believed your thoughts and memories weren't even worth it; like they would have been clutter. Unusable. But we are still too much alike. Every year I find more of you in my mirror. In my house. Downtown. At the dock.

Will I love my future children the way you loved me?

Mom still wakes up at 5:30, did you know? She makes me tea, and gives me a look she used to give you. I can see that she is afraid that I am becoming increasingly unreachable; that she is watching history repeat itself. She read it in your cards, and I guess she read it in mine too.

"You are so much like him," she'll fuss. She'll ask me to cut my hair for the hundredth time. "He liked that too," when I breathe in fresh air. Her garden was your favorite place in the world. "You know, your father..."

—She's getting married soon, but I can see that she still misses you. Your name is still on her lips, but she keeps them pursed to take a slow sip of her too-hot drink. She doesn't want to burn herself on the memory of you.

Optimism: I’m in love. Pessimism: I’m dying. Realism: We all are. It’s hard to say goodbye with chapped lips and clumsy words, but empty pockets feel better when they’ve spent more time capturing your body heat than bits of metal and paper. —I didn’t look at the cup long enough to know if it was half empty or half full because it was dropped before I could reach the sink. Now it’s just a bunch of shattered glass beneath bare feet in the middle of winter. My hands had become so numb just before they touched warm water for the first time since the chill and it was a surprising sensation —an unexpected pain as I started to feel again; you feared frostbite but I only thought about the painful walk home.

I know you like the back of our hands; I have you saved in the spaces between our fingers and have read your fortune in the lines of our palms. I know your transparent gestures and have found your eyes in my mirror, vacant only because our thoughts have built the cities we’ve been longing for. You sync the rise and fall of our chests and I’ve found your mind wrapped around mine, trapping us in the dark. Together we understand the current, wading through the fabric of space time. We have discovered us once again.