Dusk

The grass was still damp below my head, its musky redolence draped around us like a cool wind. It was the end of summer but the recent rain had brought a slight reprieve from the maddening heat. I was seventeen that year, soaking in the brisk ambivalence of youth, not especially concerned with my last year in school or what lay beyond it. I did not know then that my days in Oklahoma were rapidly drawing to a close; that home would soon mean something different and everything it had been before would resolve into memory. That day, under a blue and orange wash of sky, I only knew the rich presence of a girl named Sandy. She lay next to me not saying a word, her shoulder a gentle reminder against mine. Her breathing was light, almost inaudible above the buzzing and chirps that droned somewhere out in the vastness of elsewhere. It was easy to imagine her disappearing into her own silence. The quietness of her being, it somehow affirmed her presence and I felt it like a weight, pulling me and the grass and the sky toward her. She was long-limbed but full, curvy in the way many girls her age had yet to become. Her face was sprinkled with freckles but you never noticed them at first because her eyes were what drew you in. And she was here, with me, in the middle of a field at the end of summer.

Sunsets lasted longer than they had any business to in those days, and we bathed in its effusive glow in silence. Despite being neighbors and having gone to school together since the second grade, we had only become real friends at the beginning of that summer. Her father had been in an accident at the steel mill where he worked, and because her mom spent most of that summer with him in the hospital, our family took her in. She slept at home but came over for meals, and it was this circumstance that led us to, for the first time in our lives, actually spend time together. We had different friends at school, but that summer that didn’t seem to matter. For those few short months, we were each all the other cared to know. The fields and forest that fenced our yards became our playground, and though neither of us had taken the time to explore the land before, we found ourselves constantly hiking through the woods and tromping through the meadows. We talked, mostly, sharing stories and insights that neither of us knew we had. Other times we just walked in silence. Something about the presence of someone who was new but also an old acquaintance opened up a kind of easy intimacy between us. We spent almost every day together, abandoning the local movie theater and strip malls we had frequented in summers before in favor of rambling jaunts through the woods behind our houses. Even in those days, I suspected she sought some kind of escape, but whether she actually was or if she really found it, I never knew. I never asked.

It would be the last summer I would spend with Sandy. When school started that fall we would go back to our own friends, sharing smiles and waves when we saw each other across the halls but never saying more than a few words to each other. At the end of our senior year her family would move to California, where her dad had gotten a new job behind a desk. I would leave home for school in Connecticut, and not long after my family would move out East to join me. Our homes in Oklahoma would eventually be bought up by a developer and, along with the fields and forest behind them, be turned into a housing subdivision, though I would never see any of it happen.

But on that day, lying in the fading light next to her, our shoulders just touching, me straining to tune in to the steady cadence of her breath because it seemed like the most important thing I could know, all I felt was the immenseness of her. She was pulling me toward her and I fell willingly, giddy to be lost in the embrace of her aura. The future was still unknowable then, the present enough to leave me content with its whispers of bliss. With her body so close to mine, both of us breathing in the last breaths of our youth, I felt full. I did not know if we would be friends when the school year started, or if our next summer would be the same. But it did not matter. There, in the field, next to her, anything was possible as dusk crept closer, and that was enough.