There are few images more permanent in my mind than those of the clear summer nights I spent with them...

My hands spread, two isolated buoys, plucking my reluctant arms from the water like a petal from its kin. The cool mountain air bit at the tip of my nose and the moon revealed his dilated eyes.

My converse dangled off the bed of Andrew’s truck. All the evidence of sunlight had gone, the alley lights flickered on one by one, casting a spotlight on the rocks, the breeding ground of our infamous behavior. Dense, milky smoke clouds billowed into the decaying leaves between the rims of a Beamer and a Camry. Her lustrous hair swayed while they scampered off to the dugout, her pointer finger suffocating his pinky.

A boy in a black button down shirt sank into the deteriorating sofa beside me, listening to his nose squeal each time he inhaled. I put my feet in his lap. Smoke hung on our shoulders and clung to the small rectangular windows of the dented side door. Laughter echoed off the perfect rows of empty Lagunitas bottles that masked each inch of drywall. The green rug curled at the corners of the room to reveal cracked concrete. The ping pong table was coated in sticky red stains and, near the edge of the left side, sat the coke he hadn’t already bumped.

I attempt to separate these images as best I can, despite their efforts to run together like water from a broken dam through the hills and valleys of my brain. Colliding with the sides of my skull until it breaks, and the memories spill throughout, the clear ones filling a crevasse, the muddled desperately trying to fidget their way out of the center, to the white peaks of remembrance.