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The basketball rolls toward you with the wind and you follow along its black lines like a papyrus. You trace its path to its court but find it only tosses itself now.
Spotted spurge and dandelions poke out of the cracks of the pavement like tentacles, and you weave through them before you can mat their necks like other dreams. (A cactus in the far distance of your mind takes your most tempestuous step but he returns it. You feel the subsequent puncture through your foot and step away from the world for a moment.)
The wind abates in return for a calm spring rain pebbling across the ground: watercolour droplets bleed into the concrete and their edges blend and soften and reach out to yoke together into dark-grey blotches; a friendly game of blob tag. The only two shoes in the court soak up the water like a sponge and you are inured to it, so much so that you are pulled into its thirst, even in the pulse of the dampened cold. You soak, and soak, and soak. (You have felt like this once before. You have once soaked it up until it filled your lungs; what was it?)
You squelch off the court, pass the basketball that glistens with wet skin to no one at all, and breach Faraway Town. (Your bloody feet drag across the wet floor and somehow, you are the injured animal.)
(A cactus in the far distance of your mind leaves a spine in your skin, but you never meant to hurt it.)
So much water has collected on your back since you ventured out to the heart of Faraway Town, and now you stand drunk on the sogginess of a plaza you once roamed dewy-eyed, blithe still in the morose skies downcasted on its strip mall. The smell of fresh marinara and melted mozzarella wafts out the door of Gino’s when a person carries out three large boxes of pizza – then raw dough escapes into the air and winds its way to your nose through the enlarging bits of rain. With it comes the low murmur of a vacuum deep in your stomach, but it is quickly drowned out by a sprightly cadence of the voices from inside the restaurant. Something in the myriad tones catches onto a sliver of your heart. It catches onto many slivers of your heart, and suddenly it is too much to pass by.
The rain is now inconsolable. (It collects on your back until it is too heavy to carry.)
Gino’s welcomes you, and it is the first time in so long you allow yourself to be welcomed by something so warm. White pizza boxes stack up into towers on the front counter. A jukebox sings a jangly tune and beside it, a green arcade machine swallows up another coin from an unwavering boy, who mutters something undecipherable at the firing neon pixels on the screen. Other escapees of the weather are sat in the restaurant, bundled into their own clusters of peers at their claimed red-and-white checkered tables; they are hurling slices of pizza into their mouths, speaking through muffling food, and you remember, in black and white film, a young you in the far corner indulged in a slice of your own.
—-
Robin’s egg eyes glint excitedly at you. The little girl asks you, with her smiling voice, what you think of the cheesy triangle – topped strangely with chunks of fruit – the moment it touches your tongue.
“I like it, I think.”
“Wait…what? Are you sure?”
“It’s salty… But, the pineapples balance it out, sort of.”
“C’mon, Sunny! You can’t be serious!”
A boy interjects. “See, Aubrey? I told you he’d like it! You’re the only one who doesn’t.”
“That’s not true! Basil, what about you? You don’t think pineapples belong on pizza, do you?”
The one with a flower-crown resting on his hair smiles softly. He looks down at the half-eaten crust between his fingers. “Well, you’re right. I don’t. I just can’t find it in myself to enjoy it as an actual meal…”
“Hah! Hear that, Kel? Basil hates your stupid concoction!”
“Wait, I didn’t say I hate it! I’m just a little indifferent to it, that’s all.”
“Man, whatever! You both have no taste at all.” The boy harrumphs and storms his head away from the two. He meets your eyes, and the sun pours out again from the cracks of his lips.
“Guess it’s just you and me against the world, huh, Sunny?”
He adds – “that’s why you’re my best friend.”
—-
The film is clipped short, those same garden shears gnawing away at its rope hungrily – and you cannot feel your hands, and you wonder how much cold has seeped into your blood for it to thicken into the red slush you feel coursing throughout you, slowed at the junctions of your knobby fingers, halted at the pipes of your heart. You try to recount the things you knew; the things that reverse and unravel the tangled strings that hold captive your bones; the things that thaw you; the sun. And you realize as you look down, there is a puddle forming at your feet. Your bangs are soaked to your forehead; your skull is still so frozen you cannot shake off the rain. You cannot gather yourself, or dust the water off your clothes, and you feel yourself falling from the sky, disdained by the sun, and then—
Your belly turns and you remember you are hungry. Your belly turns until the hunger is as big as the cold stone caught in your throat.
Quiet apologies are pushed from your mouth as you stiffly approach the counter, leaving behind footprints like little ponds. A chalkboard propped up by barrels on the walnut hardwood reads in erratic white, “Pizza of the Day: Pineapple Pleasure.” Prices are smudged beneath: three for a slice and twelve for a whole. You finger through the front pockets of your denim with both hands, feeling for round copper, finding success in a cold and wet amount of two.
“Sorry, kid,” the woman in a yellow apron says from behind the counter as she looks over – you have not yet even chanced the question. “Can’t buy anything for two dollars these days. Real sorry about that.”
Still, your hunger persists. “What about a drink?” Your gaze follows in pursuit to the glass pane of a sugary-soda filled cooler. Bottles of the classic Coke win over the variety and you can feel raging bubbles rising already in your stomach.
“Depends. Got a couple more cents?”
With any transcendental chance you’ll take, you rake your hands through your pockets once more, even when you know there are only loose strings of denim left to find. Expectantly, you come up empty-handed, and your face does not even morph. “No, but thank you anyway.”
You turn to leave the restaurant, and the door invites you out; out of the chance of a charity case, out into the heavy percussion of the rain again. Your uncovered skin meets those familiar intermittent bursts of water that then fall like shooting stars to the ground. The air is so cold against your restaurant-warmed body.
“Sunny? Is that you?”
(The lilting voice of a cactus beckons for you; it is set by your door and covered with al dente to soft hairs so you can scathelessly harvest the pink mammillaria that has blossomed just for you. All it can do now is wait until it is ensconced safely within your hands.
It waits, and waits, and waits; you do not water it. Someone once told you it can love you dry.
It waits, and waits, and waits; the aridity stiffens its hairs.
It waits, and waits, and waits; the flowers begin to wilt.
It waits, but you do not ever open the door, and finally, the cactus rolls away like a tumbleweed in the desert, floor buckling beneath it while you sit at ease in the corner of your room. Now it is a vagabond roaming someplace in a picture book, and you whisper out shakily that he cannot wait for you anymore. Nevertheless, the car window is rolled all the way up.)
“What are you— I mean— you’re soaked.”
The tanned-skinned boy your age is sheltered barely within a tiny multi-coloured umbrella. He moves his free hand around in front of him like he doesn’t know what to do with it. He moves his hand like he is attempting to wave off the ghosts that rouse him from his sleep. And you stand, certainly soaked under the grey umbrella of the entire vault of the sky, without anything to say but sorry.
You stand with tinnitus heavy in the air and maybe you are hearing the ghosts as he sees them. You stand with your gaze over that tanned skin, even when summer has not yet kissed his almost fully matured body. You stand as you are almost unbelieving of the boy that stands back.
“Kel…I’m sorry.”
His face is so much older now. So much more bereft of the light you thought would play there forever.
“I’m so sorry.”
His cheeks are hollowed out and something silent in you, maybe not for the first time, wants to reach out and plant itself on the curve of his chiseled jaw.
“I don’t know what else to say other than I’m sorry. I really am.”
You can see he does not yet have the words to shred your apologies before they become constant, and you can see he himself is in pieces first. It is in the soft squinting of his coffee grounds eyes. It is in the minimal gape of his still cracked lips. You want more than anything to pick up the shards and rearrange them into the beautiful mosaic that he is: a mosaic of every experience casted upon him, and you want to never be a part of it again. To free him of the hex that you are. But as always, the sharp ends prick at your skin and get stained with your blood, and you know it will not wash out with anything. (This has been learned time and time again. That red fluid of yours reeks of selfishness and tours the green of the cactus; will you let it drown at your cherry-soaked fingertips?)
Please, say something.
You are on the brink of forgetting his voice again, perhaps for one last time; it has been so long since it shaped the taste of your ears.
I know you don’t want me to say it anymore, but I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.
Kel looks torn and still so distant, like he at any moment will disappear back into the reclusion of wherever he had to go on without you. It is sour to you like lemons: the raw and unprotected thought of you not being there for him in the morning haze – when you allowed the murky grief to mist over him too, like the sprinklers sweeping across the front yard neither of you could have been prepared for. You were both caught in it but only he assumed the responsibility of finding the spigot through the rush of the deluge; you only ran further down the street until you met the lone highway in the belly of the starless night.
It is hard not to pray for karma to slash your Achilles tendons like tires.
But first, Kel fights for his next words – “No. You don’t get to do that.”
And the voice finally comes – it is almost cloying to your ears. Now in your interlude, you do not dare to interrupt the torrent flowing freely from your old friend’s lips.
“You don’t get to say sorry this late in the game. That’s not— that isn’t fair.” His speech is lined with cracks, but to you it sounds like it is catching Prince Rupert’s drops like a rain drum. “You have to know that isn’t fair.”
“I know. I–” You cease when you realize how coated your throat is in black tar.
For some reason, you cannot eject this – I’m sorry. I can’t seem to stop hurting you, can I?
There is a thick blue nothing between you now, and your words no longer fit on your tongue the way they did in the deepest darkest crevices of your mind. They join the growing prickly burr that catches onto the lining of your stomach, and you feel like you are about to double over hurling until your soul is rinsed clear. You are so still against your old friend who wears shaking skin.
Kel’s face finally breaks into something contorted and you almost step back. The brown of his irises darken to the shade of an abyssal plain, infested waters you cannot jump into. You pick apart every twitch in his features and hope to soften them before they end up mangled beyond recognition. He is angry – just about baring his ivory teeth – at you.
“You don’t get to come back out of the blue after so many years and expect pity.” His tone begins to crest, and you are finally starting to feel the fracturing effects of the collision. “It’s been so long, do you realize that? It has been so fucking long.”
Like the rain, bubble-bright tears lurch out of the inner corners of his eyes, and he does not bother soaking them up with his sleeve.
“You left us for good, and I can’t feel sorry for you anymore. I can’t.” His shoulders drop and his breathing stumbles off the record. He looks like he is about to fall forward, heaving, but not into your arms. Instead, he catches himself like he had to do for years on his own. “Everyone fucking left and you were the only one I had hope in. You were the only one who hadn’t abandoned me for some stupid distraction. You didn’t kill yourself off like the others did, like everyone was scared you would do. And I thought that had to count for something.”
His words bleed into his sobs.
“But I was alone, Sunny. I was all alone, and then you just left.” He sounds smaller, and smaller, and smaller.
You no longer have the words to describe the air outside, but you know that it is lodged too deep inside your old friend’s lungs. The world has fallen so dim against the plaza’s streetlamps and the strip mall’s lit windows. The quiet it mourns is lapped up against by the soft sorrows of Kel’s sniveling. His teary-eyed gaze never leaves yours.
“I always tried to be there for you,” he says beneath the weight of stacked islands, breath collapsing, knuckles a gradient to white at the hook of his umbrella – “but would you have even been there for me?”
(The cactus pierces with clipped breaths of mercy veiled too far beneath its spines, for red inkblots blossom and disseminate across your clothing like constellations. But you cannot blame nature for its methodic yet aimless sweeps of violence; he defends himself the same way.
You will take hit after square hit for him until you are spent completely. You deserve the barbarity of it all and you decide you must embrace it wholly, and allow it to chip every bone in your body. To atone for your negligence upon something so innocuous and of such innate beauty, you will bloody your hands and your feet with every impalement of every quill. And if the flowers ever bloom again, you will say you do not deserve them.
You will stomach it all until the pricks alleviate into painless nil.
The cactus, one day in the distant future, will no longer sob at your doorstep and your fraught disappearance. Maybe, one day in the distant future, you won’t have to disappear.)
“I have so much that I want to say to you. That I’ve waited so long to say.”
The heavy dark clouds prune and pass by at once, and the world lies on the cusp of a crepuscular province, silvery and luminous with the freckling grains of quartz in the Kosmos. But for now, the cleared skies fall into a deep orange with peach and strawberry and dragon fruit blending across the horizon, and cerulean approaches from the far distance of the universe. Quietude rests yet again on the land and it stills the picture completely. Your skin begins to dry, and the wounds become too numb to feel.
“But you gotta know this,” Kel says through evaporating tears, his bedewed eyes consoled by the colour wash of dusk. “I could never hate you, Sunny.”