by Maria S. Picone

Launch Track

My first memory is the billowing curtains on the second floor of our preschool. It was in an old colonial house repurposed into a place for ‘Bright Beginnings.’ During our daily circle, I would watch the curtains flap like bird’s wings.

I recall the gentle seasons when I could play with my best friend David in the backyard, the son of my parents’ best friends, in one of those primary-colored boxes that substitutes for a whole playground. We would alternate going down the yellow slide and looking at the primary colors around us: blue sky, green grass, yellow sun.

Tired out, we’d lay down and gaze at the clouds, two stubby fingers jabbing the whole heavens. We’d wait for our mothers together and I’d hold Jane’s hand or he’d hug my mom if she got there first and we’d stand together in a circle like the pine trees overhead.

On-ride camera

I’m twenty and my face is tilted up towards the camera as I try to look aloof but not mad. I am wearing a dress with a halter top and a keyhole in the cleavage. This dress, the blues of a lagoon, a temperamental summer ocean, a lake with a strip of sky—I gave it away long ago, but I still remember the feeling of slipping it on.

I appear shaded, all hues of blue; it is nearing the end of the year and this semester has been an abyss of loss. Later this summer, I’ll get shingles as my body decompresses and hauntings of the past surge within me. But, for the evening, I will try to be carefree.

We took the picture on the stairs and there’s clear construction behind us, a bench ruining the shot. Perhaps one of my friends pressed me to take a picture and this was my attempt at sabotage. Perhaps we were too foolish to see how the elements came together, focused as we were on the subject in the frame.

Banked turn

Why we went to preschool for two years, I don’t know, but now I realize it must have been because our mothers worked. Long before a tech giant called HP, there was Digital.

To me, my mother and Jane had always known each other. They talked and acted like it too. Plus, I was young. I didn’t know that friendships could live and die. I imagine them gathering there, two shy French-American girls at the big tech company. They must have dodged a lot of unsavory ’80s men.

Years later, I’d visit Jane at her house and watch her move her mouse around every five minutes to convince her corporate bosses she was working. The house favored plaid, bright golden wood and a hint of rustic mountains, the soul of Vermont or Colorado. David moved out West first, with his parents to follow as I scoffed about the dream. In 2013, I moved to Boulder, and they were the only people I knew. I miss that sunlit wood, that thin and challenging air.

I miss David and I know his parents miss him too.

Vertical loop

At twenty, David had his life figured out and mine was falling apart. I lost both grandmothers, most of my college friends, and my trust in my university in one year. He was studying music production at his dream college and getting serious with his girlfriend. When I saw him that year, he smiled his Mona Lisa smile and told me everything was going well—within reason. I knew he had been pushing back against expectations, experimenting with alcohol and drugs. Little did any of us know that he would take a hard left turn, dropping out of school and leaving his parents to pay for his loans and a series of new starts, whereas I would hang on to my life like a thrill-ride seat bar and come out the other end of the tunnel.

Camelback

The last time we saw each other, he walked into the California Pizza Kitchen on 28th Street in Boulder with a grin and a Castaway joke. It had been a long time since I’d seen him without a woman on his arm telling him what to do. Some had been friendly; others, like his current girlfriend, emanated the cold of the Colorado fourteeners. We tried to catch up, but for me and him, time didn’t exist. We could have been eight and playing Boxcar Children or sixteen and playing the piano. When I reached out my hand in the cradle he was there. Some threads never get cut, no matter how hard you wield the scissors. Some seasons are always flowering.

Helix

He is not a person anymore. He exists in a Schrodinger’s box of Polaroid memories; he is a drifting cloud imagined to be elsewise by a mythmaking child; he is the green, yellow, red, and blues of the crayon box. He has three daughters. He has a scar where the knife stabbed him. He is every phone call to his parents that my parents hear about and tell me. Some of them say “fuck you you were a terrible mother” and others say “help me, I’m a castaway on a distant shore.” He is every plane ticket from Denver to Boston and Boston to Denver that never got used. He is the money sink that manipulates his parents into buying another new apartment, another new playschool box to grow up in, another cell phone she’ll throw in the road and break, another set of bones she’ll tear to bits for looking at another woman.

Brake run

For my thirteenth birthday, we all traveled to Disney. The highlight of our trip was riding the Incredible Hulk, a rollercoaster that features a quick, perfect launch. In the official picture, you can see our parents making corny faces and David’s goofy smile.

We are joy suspended in midair.

Photo by Pedro Velasco on Unsplash