Nights Like These

It’s days like these where there is too much time in the air, slowly unwinding and peeling back. In that sliver of moment that drags on, my memories spread like a freshly ironed shirt. The creases straightened flat, the valleys and days lay bear for my eyes to see.

Seeing, my mind falls back to a different life. Not to possibilities, those tomorrows are gone. They are gone in the way incensed ash falls from form and lays in a heap. Still, sometimes the lingering scent, as if the faint of patchouli still pressed against my bed sheets. The dust liters my pillows and I begin to remember those days gone.

Gone like that Grant Hill rookie card as it washed away in that street gutter the day that storm hit. I think i was only a child then, but that card held so much hope and dreams–G money was meant to be so much more! But then went the neighbors too, boys and girls with whom I collected and traded. Washed away by the stream of time. Wiped away as glass is wiped; the windex nozzle spits its ammonia as the towel tries to erase the stains.

Stains like the stain-glassed windows that sanctified my church. Those colored patterns and cracks, I remember their light reflecting on me as the hues pressed against my eyes almost blinding. My every choreographed step, dancing with the resolution and its binding sight, how far did I walk in the shade of such light?

Light like the ones I love, for whose light fills the darkness that murmurs from within. In the caverns unlit, fires are born with the lighting of my lantern. I see how the fireball consumes and rages, like a human torch, it’s almost fantastical. Born in such flames, like a Khalessi with her dragons, emotions are unearthed. Voltaire cried when Lisbon shook, and still he trembled at the power of nature.

Nature, that familiar spring that once made Peter and Wendy sing. And Peter use to fly, a marked dance, as foolish as the pied piper lost in the folly of her trance. Wendy, how she laughed and cried, his green tights made her heart come alive. In those days those feelings were sincere, love came from within and they held each other dear. There were no odds or obstacles, the lost boys were his and they were also hers.

Her, that enigma that shared his hopes. How once they walked hand in hand, certainties entwined with ambitions to change the world. I think about how much love there was, support, and how high they flew once. And then those hands forever split, as he left her to her projects and flew away to Neverland.

Neverland, a place of perpetual night. Peter lost Wendy’s face, but still her voice creeps on Nights like These. A message in a bottle from a sunken away ship, never will he send one not even as time persists. She threw away the anchor as he flailed like a Centipede drowning in fits.

On Nights like These when the weather hits softly, memories rise but also subside. They fade away like the fizz that releases out from a soda can. Though I remember and even rue what has come to pass, even lament the tragedy that our friendship couldn’t last, I too remember I made a choice, to stop living like that.