Sixteen

It's quite possible that in the decade that has passed since the Summer I turned sixteen the sharp edges of the weeks I spent about town have been made smooth by the passing of time, leaving it all, all of the days, all of the hours, as a round, flawless stone. I don't think so though.
We had just finished our exams and the four of us, bonded by the idea of impending adulthood, had grown inseparable, almost interchangeable, in the months leading up to our freedom from school. We had found one another haphazardly. A zig zagged line had jutted out from each of our social circles (mine decidedly smaller than theirs) and, like the darts that hunters sometimes use to paralyse their prey, jabbed us all in the sides and reeled us in, in, in until we were holding hands and laughing. So much time spent laughing.
We really were an unlikely group though. Two boys. Two girls. Two blondes. Two brunettes. One boy so filled with confidence it bubbled out of him in long, excitable, attention-seeking prose. The other, gay and hiding from everything. Two girls who had lost their fathers. All of us looking, finding something in each other that made it a little easier, at least for a while.
We would sit on the roof and some of us would smoke cigarettes and all of us would look across at the hill that rolled and tumbled into the cliffs and down into the sea and we'd talk sometimes about where we were going and where we had been already.
The things you think you know so much about at sixteen.
The things you're sure you'll never understand.
Cameras.
We spoke about cameras a lot in fact.
In the final weeks and days of school I had grown desperate to be a great photographer. I lacked any patience or real understanding of photography of course, and I completely hated being at the beginning of a journey that felt like it would take the whole Summer, an eternity in my eyes, to get to the end of.
He carried his camera everywhere, hung over his shoulder as though his heart beat from within the lens and would stop if he and it were separated. He snapped pictures with an ease and effortlessness that I envied and documented our days with such viveur and a joy so contagious that I am smiling a wide, wonky, brace filled smile in every photograph he took of us then. I loved him for that.
We spent most of our time in the roof of his house, through a small cupboard door always covered in freshly pressed shirts on hangers. We would climb up and into the room we had claimed as our own (to the chagrin of his Grandfather) and eat crisps and soup and sit on the cushions and pillows we had stolen from the rooms downstairs, away from the light outside, away from time passing.
Once, each laying out on the floor, our hands and arms wrapped up in one another, I played a CD I had bought by some Canadian guy with flat hair and soft, round eyes who promised to teach us how to be a more confident version of ourselves. Confidence was something I had been looking for for as long as I could remember and had hoped could be taught through exercises and bar charts; I thought it was like an expensive suit you had to earn. I hadn't yet realised that when I grew into myself it would come. Slowly and in its own time but it would come all the same; the others knew this already, their howling made that quite clear. I didn't try again to make us any better. Things were already pretty great as they were.
We set about redesigning our roof hideaway, boxing up old, toy train tracks and other things that had been stored there over the years. We assigned spaces for certain activities; eating was to be done in the corner by the cool box, playing computer games in the cushioned area by the door.
There was a junk shop near his house and we went there almost every day we were redecorating. The owner, a lady who always wore sweatshirts with collars and anchors or dog motifs embroidered on the front, would say hello at first and then soon started regaling the four of us with stories from her past. 
We convinced her, and I don't remember how it started now, that we were two young boys who had fallen in love, whose parents wouldn't accept the relationship, who had taken it upon themselves to climb into the world and fight.
"Love is worth fighting for isn't it?" we would ask.
"Sometimes it's all there is" she would say.
And so we told her we were living in some crappy loft and we had a mattress and one cupboard and some plates and each other and she would give us lamps and television units and small bedside tables for free and we would thank her and she would smile and then go about stacking chairs and piling up magazines, one after the other, after the other.

Grasshoppers

Ashes

He took a cigarette from his coat pocket and tucked it, unlit, between his lips. He was standing in front of me and I noticed his sleeves first and how long they were, covering his wrists and going all the way down to the middle of his hands. Long and impractical.
I thought about touching his wrists, I wanted to feel his heartbeat there with the tips of my fingers.
Ba-booming, ba-boom. ba-boom.
And then in the same breath I worried that when lighting his cigarette he would catch his sleeve, long and impractical as it was, and how quickly the flames would travel up his arms and how all at once he would burst into a ball of molten, orange fire and I could hear him screaming above all the other noise in my head and I could see him flailing and reaching out and trying, really trying; and my heart felt like a fist in my chest and I knew then that we were doomed because I cared too much and he would most probably die some violent death leaving me alone and surrounded by all the ashes. 
Somebody's always leaving.

The middle

She had already jumped to the middle, where the two of them were waiting, the big and difficult questions answered by then. The things they had carried over, the things from their lives before, piled neatly between her and him. There but not there; the intangible physical somehow. A glowing orb, a blue light bobbing up and then down, a quiet buzzing, a hum. A hum growing louder and louder still, he and her stood facing one another somewhere off in the distance, that hum a symphony of stories. Their stories. Echoes.

She wished they had a beach house where they could spend nights wrapped up in one another, the sea crashing outside the window like plates, sand spiralling up and up and up; tiny tornadoes whistling through and across seaside winds. Inside and against the crackling of kindling and fire, choruses of do you remember when's and I love you. I love you. I love you.

Night

It is late.
It is dark.
The wind outside is hard and noisy and sounds like pages being torn out of a book.
I am in bed.
I thought for a second how nice it would be to come home to someone. Somebody who had been waiting, their arms like two pillows.