Do you remember?

Walking on hot blacktop. Playing tetherball. Staring at a line of ants for a really long time. Making a sling shot out of a branch and a big ass industrial rubber band. Risk. Being happy to eat pizza and watch movies with your friends sans drugs and alcohol. Filling out magazine subscription cards for the mean lady down the street. Lying on the grass, exhausted. Running around in a circle until you are dizzy. Playing kick the can. Getting your friends together to pretend to play instruments to really lame pop music. Stealing quarters from your parents’ change jar. Kissing someone for the first time. Holding hands. Spending lots of money at 7-11 for candy and soda. Not ever thinking about how that soda and candy was crap and poison. Jolt. Pop rocks. Saying the school dance is lame and you don’t want to go. Going anyway because you really do want to go. (The dance was lame.) Listening to your Dad’s old Beatles records obsessively until you know every song, even the weird one’s you won’t understand until you are older and more experienced with drugs. Playing kickball. Getting in a fight and being really scared. Reading old Chip Hilton Novels that your Dad saved. Hating Fireball Finley. Lying on the couch and watching TV when it really was a beautiful day and you really should have been outside. Smoking your first cigarette and trying to act like it was fun. Getting the hang of it. The simple joy of your slender fingers launching the butt into a swirling nicotine comet. Explosion of sparks on the street. Lighting an M-80. Throwing it. Realizing that your Mom is sad and you don’t know what to do about it. Hating someone because they are better at ping pong than you are. Swimming in the summer, lying on the warm concrete. French fries and frozen Three Musketeer Bars. The old guy who lived down the street and walked home every afternoon with a case of beer under each arm. Being kind of scared that there is someone in your house/closet even when you know that there isn’t. Getting into arguments that seem to dominate everything. Usually being wrong. The freedom of the hours away from adult supervision. Skate ramps. Pick up basketball games. Being in really good shape. Running really fast. The simple, pure act of running and being so swift. Playing football in the rain. Mud. Wanting to go to a party so badly that the need for it threatens to eclipse the entire universe. Watching goonies a lot. Hating and loving with equal purity. Not holding grudges. Swimming in a pool you are not supposed to be in. Jumping fences. Rolling down hills. Ice blocking. Discovering masturbation. Being ashamed. Taking sips of your dad’s beer while the two of you watched a game that neither of you cared about. Enjoying it. Realizing that everyone is fucked up in their own special way. Living, aging, losing sight of the luminous past.