July 4, 2024 - You will not hear her at first, so she will ask you again

The fog is called a sweetness, in some cities all the movies are in black and white. Night piers along the Hudson here feel like wishlists, jumbles of sounds and wind-swept memories that hover over the river in the early mornings. We tried giving imaginary gifts made from incenses, candle smoke, and sencha green tea poured forever-hot out of a stainless steel pot that would glisten in the afternoon sunlight. Back then, seven miles felt like twelve summers ago, a gust of wind on an early autumn morning, frozen piña coladas from El Lago II on Smith Street, the one that doesn’t close until three. Those summers we could feel the sun coming up through the bridges that kept stretching across the East River. We kept dreaming about bonfires and two a.m. confessions over dark dark beers, flames that would dance through the block cold nights every Saturday in March. Those first three years were a hammock strung between two trees too new to hold our weight. Maybe somewhere . . . in South Florida or across the very center of Tennessee on a fourth of July fourteen years from now, I’ll be on rollerblades and gliding down a narrow path with the sound of fireworks soaring, careening, what have you, about the sky above me. And you’ll be on Smith Street, a few feet away from where El Lago II once stood. A child will walk by with a bicycle, with a rear tire that has gone all the way flat, and one sparkler in her left hand. You will not hear her at first, so she will ask you again, do you have a lighter? she will say, for this sparkler . . excuse me, she will ask you again, do you have a lighter? For this, for this . . .