It is difficult to believe that as you move through
a sultry thick night like this that somewhere, not far off,
there is the boy the age you once were and he is dropping
off his girlfriend in her shadow driveway, the flood light
is blinking awake like a newborn. They are saying their
goodbyes, their nuzzled and whispered promises. Ephemeral things.
And then this boy will meet his friends, who have just
deposited their own girlfriends safely under their parents
noses. Surreptitious thieves! They will joke incisively,
smoke a little dope on the front porch, sidle up in pairs
for cigarette breaks under a ponderous, velvet sky. That muddled
tapestry. They’ll sit in a small room, packed hip to hip,
sweating, skimming the late night stations. Maybe play some
video games. Soon it will be two or three, earlylate.
Some stragglers will go for coffee and eggs, and each
will return home to the serenade of birds and that flat,
dense virgin light. Each, in his own way, will feel the
first intuition of a larger yearning: that he is in a
threshold of time, not a part of anything, waiting mostly
for an adumbration of a dream that is life to begin.
Wasted nights, these inbetween and forgotten hours. Each,
in his own way, will feel these are precipital hours.
The yearning is wordless, night deep. An incompleteness
they believe will be filled by women and careers,
homes and children. If I could talk to myself,
I would say to hold on a while. That the yearning only
deepens. That the incompleteness is not meant to be filled,
cannot be. So he might as well stay a while
with his friends, younger than he will ever be again.