"I'm deteriorating."I wondered why you would say that. I looked at you and noticed how tan you'd gotten. I caught a glimpse of your two rows of straight white teeth through that crooked smile you refuse to show for cameras, let my eyes linger on the roundness of muscles underneath your white v-neck and I looked at your thick black hair. Deteriorating? My ass, you're a fucking perfect specimen.
You'd just recounted a story, insisting that it had been me who was with you when you bought that sun block chapstick at CVS that tasted really bad. You remembered wrong, though. That's what you meant by deteriorating, you said. Your memory had failed you yet again.
I wish I could so easily forget you and misplace you in my memory. I sometimes wish I could erase you altogether. It would be so much easier for me to get over you if I could remember you only as a friend, if I could forget that I ever kissed you, that I ever saw that look in your eyes, that I ever laid with my head in your lap in the late hours of the night watching art shows and infomercials with you stroking my arm.
I sat and stared at you some more, not really listening to what you were saying. I sat, just remembering.
On my drive home I thought about the memories I wouldn't want to let go of. If I could only save one memory of you, which would it be? I thought and thought, driving past places that brought back memory after memory. I wouldn't want to let any of them go, really. It would be sad to forget.
I thought about the time you gave me your white shirt to wear, the one with the little breast pocket and the rust stain. You said it looked good on me, probably because you could see right through it. We held hands and looked up at the night sky. We wondered what it would be like if the world was ruled by giant birds, and how scary pterodactyls must have been. We wondered if deep sea creatures would explode if we brought them to the surface. We kissed.
I remembered watching the moon disappear in the sky from the bleachers at the park. I put my arms around you because you were cold. You felt soft and sleepy. We kissed in the absolute dark of a total lunar eclipse. A man walking alone passed us as we sat. You pulled me close, to protect me. "You never know, he might have been a serial killer." you said. We sat in the baseball dugout. My shoes were covered in red clay when I got home.
I remembered the way you looked at me the first time we kissed, I remembered you dropping me off at piano lessons and wishing me luck. I remembered how every night that you took me home you would wait for me to get inside my house before you drove off. I remembered that time we got pulled over for running a stop sign because the cop was tailgating us, you teaching me how to light a match without tearing it out of the book, you waiting in my driveway with Journey blasting from your car speakers, I remembered all the times you opened doors and pulled out chairs for me.
If I had to keep only one, though, it would be the memory of that morning in May when I woke up on a couch with you on the floor beside me in a house that was neither yours nor mine. We gathered our things and left quietly. I was wearing a purple shirt and blue jeans. You were wearing a white undershirt and black dress pants. I asked if you could give me a ride home. You said "Of course." We held hands all the way back to my house. It was early morning. You stopped in the street in front of my house. I didn't want to get out of the car. I leaned in to hug you and you buried your face in my shoulder. You squeezed me tightly and kissed my shoulder, my neck, my cheek. You breathed deeply. I didn't want you to ever let go. We sat there in front of my house, your engine idling, the warmth of the newly risen sun turning everything a curious shade of red. I never want to forget that memory. Never.
We sat there, embracing.
