You’re sitting on that ugly plaid blanket your mother loaned you several winters ago, staring at the sky because we don’t have to time to appreciate it much anymore. I want to ask you questions, like why you say your father never lies, or how old you were when you started wearing glasses. I want to know everything. I want you to ask me questions, like why I don’t go back home on breaks, or where the scar on my cheekbone came from. I want you to know everything. There’s a confession or two cuffed in the space between us, like skipped rocks in the dead silent lake stretching from me to you, breaking and sinking into a dark place I’m tempted to venture.\
Your father’s dead, and you’ve always worn glasses that weren’t quite the right prescription. You like the slight blur, the vague fluff surrounding everything hard and straight-edged. I’m not sure there’s a home waiting for me anywhere, and when I was 10 a kid jammed a stick into my moving bike tire and sent me careening over the handle bars. I having stopped falling and crashing head-first since, but maybe you already knew that. Maybe you’d already read the silence between us. Maybe you were eons ahead of me this whole time.
I could sweep your hair behind your ear, and ask what you worried about as a kid, but that’s not important now, is it? I’m starting to understand why we don’t ask questions anymore, now that we have far bigger things to worry about than if the stars are going to be out that night or if we could eat our popsicles faster than they could melt down our fingers. I’ve got a torch to light the skies between us, been holding it this entire time, but when was the last time you needed my help to see in the dark? Maybe you never needed it, and maybe you just kept me around for the company, but I can’t bring myself to leave. Can’t bring myself to sit out here on this hill alone, watching distant torches light the sky and wondering about secrets I never knew.