It's eleven thirty when I get out of the shower, oddly awake even though I've just gotten home from another long shift at work—five hours of “Hi, can I help you?” and “No, sorry, our vanilla ice cream is broken... No, I'm not kidding” should have tired me out, but if they did, the shower has woken me up. I feel energized—not anxious or twitchy, but like I will be soon. Despite the fact that it is almost curfew, I decide a late night walk is in order. The weather has, just today, warmed up enough to traipse around after dark without fear of freezing.
I send him the text without thinking; it's already a habit to just update him on the miniscule things in my life. I think it's warm enough to take a midnight walk!
His reply pinging in my pocket a moment later takes me by surprise. I'm still unaccustomed to getting answers. For so long, sending a text to the person I loved was like speaking to the air. Hearing that static speak back is enough to give anybody a shock.
I was actually just thinking that, he says. Would you care to join me for a midnight walk?
Ten minutes later we've met each other, slightly breathless from paces that are somewhere close to quarter-runs, on the sidewalk, bathed from head to toe by the yellow eyes of streetlights.
“Hi,” I say, and I realize I've broken into a smile effortlessly. “Where are we going?”
“I dunno,” he replies, and I hear in his voice that he is also smiling. I don't see it, exactly—I'm too busy hugging him before twisting off into silly skipping circles, still gripping his hand. I feel like a child when I'm with him sometimes, but not in a bad way. He makes me feel like maybe, just maybe, it's okay to be myself all the way. He makes me feel safe.
“Come this way then!” I say, grabbing his hand and leading him down the sidewalk. “Unless my sense of direction is seriously gone, there's a shortcut in the sidewalk that leads to the not-park by my house.”
“A not-park?”
“Yeah. Swings and monkey bars and shit.” We walk in silence for a moment, and when I speak again, I'm not sure if I'm informing him or reminding myself: “A lot of important things have happened there.”
“Like what?” he asks, and I ramble on for a while about old half-friends and over-blown enemies; but all the while I'm thinking of other things.
This is where ani and I weathered our thunderstorm. Where I realized he was less than sober around me for the first time. Where I found out he was in rehab. This is where my sister and I danced in the rain, singing songs that reminded us of him, but really were reminding us of life. This is where I walked on the night I listened to the moon and realized for sure that my fireworks boy and I were never getting better. That it was over. That I needed to walk away. And that I wanted to.
But I don't say any of this to him. Instead, I lead him into the not-park, where we sit on the yellow-painted monkey bars, washed colorless by late night and streetlights, and talk about our childhoods, filling our stories with little details, as if we each want the other to feel like there is nothing we have missed. Like we want to feel that we've known each other our entire life.
We end up walking again, and I find myself heading towards what was once, in the long-ago days of a gang of five and neighborhood rivalry, called the Football Field—a big span of grass between sections of houses, buffered from everything but the neighborhood street by a few feet of trees on all sides.
“I love it here!” I tell him, suddenly excited, and somehow we're both laying on the ground, staring up at the oak branches waiting for the buds to form on their fingertips, and we're laughing. Later I won't remember the joke, but perhaps there wasn't one; perhaps we only needed the night air and the feeling of almost-spring to make us just a little high. Just a little giddy.
Finally we admit to ourselves that it's late—we're almost an hour past curfew already, and both our mothers could be angry. We walk the long way along the quiet sidewalks, but we can't resist one last ridiculous stunt. We both roll down the grassy hill that leads from the main road to my street beneath, trying (and failing) to hush our giggles in the dark.
We do part, eventually, with a kiss and a plea. “Don't fall,” we call to each other, a phrase which is already starting to mean so much more: be safe, be smart, be careful. Be there when I talk to you next, and not somewhere bad. We turn our backs on each other reluctantly, and as I watch a solitary car go by, its passage like a hoarse but welcome whisper in the dark, I think, This is what I wished for when I was dealing with the fireworks that looked more like explosions and misfires. This is what I want. This is always what I've wanted.
And the stunned realization that I don't have to wait for it anymore is what carries me home.
