You called to say that the weight of time hangs heavy on your shoulders, that in your quieter moments, when you put out a hand to still the whirring of your gyroscope, you feel prematurely old. I think that you think that I hold cupped in my hand the secret key to our sandy misspent youth. But all of my drawbridges are up and I'm not even waving to the crowds from the parapets. I have hit a wall and have nothing left to hand out, and I melted down all of those keys to make a helmet. Perhaps it pays to be prepared for the future by covering my head with the galvanized past. Anyway, it couldn't hurt.
I like to drop pennies when I am walking, in hallways and on streets and across parks. I figure that, statistically, some fraction of the pennies I've sown will become someone else's lucky penny, will live in their pocket and bring them only good things. Which is almost as good as being someone's lucky penny myself.
When I think of you now I think of just one night, our skin reddened from an afternoon in the sun. I know that those were stars that we were looking at, but they were also the current between us crystallized and cast into the sky. I didn't mind that the sand on our hands constantly flaked off into the bottle of whatever sweet thing we were drinking, or that the taste of that sweet thing mingled poorly with the taste of our cigarettes when we kissed. Nor did I mind that the rough planks of the lifeguard station slowly drove small wooden splinters through my jeans and deep into the soft flesh of the backs of my thighs each time I moved. I had, after all, found the spot between your shoulder and neck where my head fit perfectly, where the smell of you breathed up through your collar and straight into my hair, and I would have suffered any number of splinters to make those hours stay unmoving forever.
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