It’s nine-thirty on a Saturday morning.
You’re walking through your grandson’s middle school.
It’s Graduation Day.
You pass by a mirror and see a reflection from decades ago.
It’s a boy, his hair wild and blonde.
Eyes unobscured by thick lenses stare back at you with a brightness that has become less and less familiar to you, eyes surrounded by clear skin, no scars, no burns. A black AC/DC t-shirt protects a tan and unpunished body. Navy shorts cover where one day there will be a tube, and jutting out of these same shorts are two full, healthy legs, and that’s perhaps what you miss the most in this moment.
You walk closer to the mirror, not by your own determination, but out of obedience to the unforgettable, a desire to see what has already been seen.
The mirror transforms into a time machine and you walk through it because you’ve only just realized that you never thought you would be here and not there.
You wonder how much you’ve forgotten. You wonder who you’ve forgotten, who has forgotten you.
So you remember what you remember.
Your first football game, freshman year of high school, when you played wide receiver, because all anyone knew of you was some skinny kid who could run. The first true friends you made back then (where are they now?), that day the lot of you got into a fight with those older boys from Joppatowne, a fight that, of course, you all won after Stevie Cavanaugh (or was it Casey Tipton?) landed a right hook square on the jaw of their biggest guy and dropped him cold.
The first girl you slept with, also the first girl you thought you loved, also the first person that really hurt you, but none of those would be the last.
The late nights spent with teammates drinking Bud Light on the darkened school football field talking about what it will be like to get old and forget about each other, then promising each other that such a thing will never happen and truly believing in that promise, because back then, none of you knew any better.
Back then, when months felt like years.
Suddenly, there’s a scruff-covered chin beneath the wild hair, a college man, but those eyes still shine with love—love for everything, the world and all its innocence, because that’s how you saw it all back then.
That’s how you saw it when you met the first (and last) girl you ever did love, real love, true love.
That’s how you saw it when you met your second group of true friends (where are they now?), and even how you saw it when you took a left hook to the nose because your best friend started a fight with the university’s lacrosse team because, hey, he was your best friend.
That’s how you saw it even when you played your last football game, now a linebacker, because you and the world realized you could tackle a guy like no one else (when did that go away?).
And yes, you saw the world with such love when you and your teammates drank Natural Light in the darkened football stadium, talking about what it will be like to get old and forget about each other, then promising each other that such a thing will never happen, and truly believing in that promise, because back then, none of you knew any better.
You held onto that youthfulness for some time and you want to say it was forever because you can’t remember the moment where it ended (but where is it now?), and so you tell yourself that it’s still there.
It was there when you and your wife-to-be moved to New York City, a job in economics (where was it when you got offered the job in journalism?) and you wonder where it was when you let an elderly Jewish man tame your wild blonde hair with a razor just so you could spend a life (sentence?) in a tie behind a desk buried underneath numbers.
You try to think of your wedding, your child’s birth, grandchild’s birth, but you can’t because you’ve realized all of the lies you’ve told to all the people you promised to remember. Fragmented names fly in and out, the only ones you can piece together are the dead ones (when will that be you—)
Your daughter taps you on the shoulder. Your grandson is standing with your wife, several paces ahead. You blink your eyes and turn away.