Too bad it’s light, because the memories that are now with him are about nights, the night in junior high that his friend Tim slept over for the first time and they pulled mattresses down onto the floor and pushed them perpendicular and spent over an hour (he knew by watching the clock, red digital numbers floating in the air) making puns that played on (played off?) the names of kids they knew in school, and Tim drifted first, voice blurring as he worked through variations on Bret Moore’s name then sharpening as he announced that he was going to sleep, and he told Tim good night, but he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even close his eyes, believing as he did that he had experienced a perfect evening inside a perfect circle of friendship that he hoped never to leave, which is why he was unwilling to mark the end of the day with sleep or even closed eyes, but eventually sleep came for him and he woke in the morning to find that both he and Tim were still happy, still joking about kids like Bret and Chris and Drew, but that something had shifted, and that what had seemed magic from one angle seemed ordinary from another, and it wasn’t that he could no longer see the perfect circle, but rathe that he could see that he was outside of it. The morning was flooded with light. Damn the light.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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