Summer

I remember lying on your sweat-soaked sheets in the mid-afternoon that summer, making images out of the texture on the ceiling while you slept beside me. You lay on your side, your damp chest sticking to my arm and your leg wrapped over my bare hips. The air was close, and the heat unyielding. A rickety fan strained to cough humid air at us from the open second-story window, as if its metal innards were slowly melting and its blades dying of heat stroke. I couldn’t imagine how you slept. Restless, I pushed your heavy leg aside and dressed in your clothes. Cars moving in slow motion on Eighth Street and the metallic sound of cicadas, electric in the afternoon haze, drew me to the window and reminded me that the world had not stopped moving as we whiled away the hours on top of your messy sheets, lazy. I remember climbing outside your window onto the shingle-covered overhang that looked out over your small front lawn and Eighth. You crawled out a minute later in nothing but a pair of shorts. The overhang was just big enough for the two of us to sit cross-legged with a dirty mason jar full of spent cigarettes and ash. The roof was gritty and sticky from the heat of direct sunlight and felt like hot sandpaper under our bare feet. We held hands and passed a cigarette back and forth. We said little, sitting, silently watching the late afternoon traffic rush and squinting at water mirages on the hot street while the sun tanned our faces and shoulders. Despite our interlocked fingers, there was a wall of misunderstanding between us and I felt it in my throat and in the bottom of my stomach. Neither of us could understand why we were no longer together. Neither of us could find an answer to the question. We were both desperate for a reason to continue, and sought answers through our best mode of communication, which was, undeniably, touch. And so we continued to meet and touch in the afternoon heat, hurriedly as if to fill up on one another bodies before time ran out, and desperate to do our best because it might be the last time. Our love was a feather in a whirlwind. In the rush of skin we groped for it, reaching for a reason that kept getting away from us, and opening our fists to empty palms. We felt momentarily satisfied for trying, though, and for the way it made us feel close, and that was enough because the moment was all we could fathom. Then we would climb out onto the overhang and light our corncob pipes or a cigarette and be quiet together until dark.