THINGS I WANT TO REMEMBER

I miss this feeling.
I miss this. Please let me.
Remember this.

Something I noticed

New Year’s Eve, 2002

It was my fifth drink. 11:48 pm. I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life. I set my drink down when it occurred to me that you weren’t sitting in the living room talking to Adam anymore. Going along with a conversation that you could give two fucks about, saying things just because you could say them. Mouth wide between sentences. Your teeth straight and white and easy to love, complimenting your jawline every time you spoke. Before I left the room, you gave me a smile to remind me you were still there. I didn’t even need it. You just did it.

I opened the screen door that lead to the backyard and saw you sitting in-between the acres of land that the earth held, ignoring where the fence ended and the trees began, around you and in front you. I knew exactly what you were doing. It wasn’t the cigarette in your hand you were smoking, it wasn’t the bottle of vodka that sat next to you, it wasn’t the moon or the sky or the cold. The night soaked you up. You were drawn to it. Just like the lake did for me. By the time my mind was done thinking about it, I was already there, next to you, like I had always somehow been before, with a cigarette in my hand and the other in yours. I said, “Where does the time go?” And you replied with, “It doesn’t.” For the first time in my life I was aware that time didn’t ever really exist, that we made it up in our minds to count so we could have something to rely on, so we can know how much we’ve grown, so we aren’t late, so we aren’t too early, so you could count the years since the last time you saw the love of your life, how long you’ve been settling for, the amount of hours it’s been since you left home and gave yourself up to your favorite seat at some shitty bar. These were the things that I realized with you, like I was re-discovering the human race as a whole, and we all could breathe the same oxygen and still be rude to each other.

We didn’t say anything after that because we started to hear the roar inside the house that we didn’t want to be in anymore.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

You leaned over and kissed both of my cheeks, my right and then my left, moving slowly so that you could appreciate my skin just as much as I appreciated your lips. And then they were suddenly on mine. Every kiss was like the first time. “Happy New Year.”