He listened to the sounds of WLS in Chicago. John Records Landecker. Oom-chugga-lugga-oom. Bye bye Miss American Pie. It was a beacon for the heart that opened up the world while the fireflies blinked like flirting eyes in the field across the street where the Singhs would build their house and live with 3 boys who never came out to play.

We stand on the corner in the summer night heat. The bugs gather in streetlight beams like darting fish in tide pools. The small and wiry guy steps into the street before us. His head is shaved and I catch the glint of a wild flame in his eye."Yo, Connie," he says, "You stick her?" Connie smiles sideways at him, cigarette hanging from his lip like a sad rope. "Ah, you know." The voice is tired. "Thattaboy," the wiry guy says and his teeth flash, silver rimmed, but his eyes see there is nothing here. "I see ya in the Punch Card," he says. Then quick/quick he saunters across the street with a strange limp toward a bar blooming with people on the sidewalk. Connie reads me. "Stay away from that guy. I fought him in the ring. He knows what I can do." Then, "Come on. Let's go." And we're off in the night, looking for the next thing.

I remember the one where Andy Gable sang "Male the Whale" at the top of his lungs and my mother stood open mouthed unable to stop the pandemonium. A scene from a warm Steve Martin comedy, except that I still remember it.

Strange, isn't it?

I removed the folder carefully from its bubble wrap protection. Within its manila barriers were images of ghosts that had been unseen for years, lost in the folds of my mind. One, two, three. Tenderness unknown and origins of scars lay on top of each other waiting for my hands to sort them. I came undone at the sight of a young woman holding a newborn baby under the shade of a Hawaiian palm tree. I turned cold at the sight of a 7 year-old boy kneeling on a stray couch cushion floating at the shore’s edge of a barren field, squinting in the cold, hard, spring midwestern sun, holding a puppy, knowing what thing lay just outside the camera’s eye.

I always think that what I want is the urgent hotness of your mouth; the feeling of pulling you in at the curve of your waist and holding you close. I always think the thing I want is your need on me and the oblivion that comes after and that only you are allowed to bring me. But the part I always find I like most is the quiet after when we are eating fruit and talking about nothing and the frozen sea inside us has been turned warm and calm and we are lost in the dappled sun of the turning leaves rustling outside the open window.

We played all day in the cake frosting snow until we found ourselves on the old bridge in Central Park and you slid in your boots like you were coming down from third base to find the winning run in the middle of summer (but it wasn't summer, and snow big as eyelashes floated down in the blue air) and my arms waved like an ump. "SAFE!"

And you were. 

And still are. 

It was raining when he told her to leave. They'd been arguing for weeks and he thought it would be easier. But it wasn't. She cried and said she didn't understand and asked what did she do. But there was nothing she did he realized as he watched her pack the scuffed baby blue Tourister and listened to the rain beat on the narrow courtyard windows. It was all him. He said that thinking it would be easier, but that didn't work either and the guilt of being an unexplainable thing stayed with him long after she was gone. Months later, when he was moving out himself, he found a pair of her underwear buried in a sock drawer and knew that his meanness would always be a part of him.

She picks up the squeaky squishy purple ring and comes over. She plops it on my outstretched leg and lays her jaw next to it. Eyes dart between me and the ring. Me and the ring. Me and the ring. Pleeeeeeeeeease. Sure. Why not? And I toss it a few feet away. She goes after it like it's the most amazing thing in the world. Dog.

You're standing at 71st and Columbus, back against brick, in the cold. You don't see me yet, but I am there and see you, hands buried in your pockets against the cold, head down, gently rubbing your lip on the edge of your jacket. You have a bobby pin in your red bobbed hair and I see your boots, new suede toes and blue leather leafing up the sides. Your socks poke out above. The New York cold press in on my cheeks. My ears are stinging.

"Hi."

"Hi."

Your smile opens a new world in me.

The ink holds the thoughts and feelings against the paper until they still: caught like prehistoric moments of life in an amber prism from another time.

I see your legs, freckled and perfect in the summer sun, punctuated by a pair of baby blue Keds. The hammock swings with us inside it and I feel the ocean inside me ending its boil. Thank you is all I want to say and close my eyes and lay here forever with you.

The summer they went to Cape Cod for July, he stood in the black oozing mud feeling the wet squish through his toes. 45 years later, he can still smell the damp algae drying in the sun.

I stood in the Pennsylvania sun wearing my freckles like spots of awkwardness, squinting in the glare next to the keg and holding a red cup of oblivion. She was older with a flowing gingham dress that was transparent in the light. She played with it in one hand. "You know," she said, "If you stand there too much longer, you'll grow roots."

"What?" I asked like I was hard of hearing. And she laughed. Toothy and beautiful.

And I thought, Holy shit. A girl is talking to me.

He jumped to free them and misjudged the drive's concrete lip. The ankle shifted just enough to throw him off without buckling and down he went. There was a blast of white pain as the pedal sliced his neck just below the jaw. In the bathroom his father hovered nervously as his mom pushed it around with her fingers. "I think he's gonna need stitches," she said. He still remembers the blue light of the chrome and porcelain world in that bathroom. "You really got yourself good," she said to him, half laughing. "I mean, really." Later kids pointed at him at a ballgame and he felt like Frankenstein. And many years after a girl named Rachel ran her finger along it as they lay under the window, naked and cold. "What's that?" she asked. 

"I got it playing Kick the Can," he said.

The bones and scars of the past have me in a trance but I can feel dawn knocking at the horizon. I'm going to look up. I really am.

I stood in the back as the performance artist spoke to the audience. Her pale Irish skin and short black hair was cropped sharply in contrast to her long, languid curves. She spoke for 20 minutes about the end of a relationship with a man who'd been funny and witty and kind at the start only to later become an ogre who mixed a salad with his fingers in a diner outside Zion. And then he grew to become a villain as he left her for another woman and thanked her for setting it up. Her vengeance was this talk which molded the opinions of 100 strangers listening from folding chairs in a room meant for ballroom dancing into a single eye of judgement. They laughed. They flinched. They shuddered in disapproval.

I remember the long bar crowded with regulars and the man with half-open eyes that Kenny said was lost on goofballs. I remember snorting snow from the corners of my driver's license and laughing at the story of the sad eyed smart mouthed girl who blew half the bar in the bathroom "just because she felt like it" and wishing I'd been there that night. I remember the golden light and neon reflections in the mirror and thinking I'll write about this some day and standing out with my college educated ideas and not belonging but wanting to belong. 

The two boys licked at their "It's It" and watched the dog wander in the grass with the squeaking squishy ring in its mouth. We listened to the crickets sing by the fence and looked at each other in the dimming light. They smiled with chocolate ringed lips. They were happy and quiet and I was, too.

Going back I see the crooked boy who lives in the gold room and my fist drives through time to smash him to bits. My knuckles fall onto his crooked smile until they are sore from pounding. And then I wake up with a face of blood and snot and a broken jaw.

Everything is fine, I say, when I'm asked at dinner. Everything is fine, I say, when I'm asked at the baseball game. Everything is fine, I say, when I'm asked at the meeting. Everything is fine, I say, when I'm asked at the therapist's office. Everything is fine, I say, when I'm asked by my children. Everything is fine, I say, when I'm asked as I lie down in darkness. Everything is fine. No, really, it is. Really. Just. Fine.