Unaware my feet still were coated in sand, I crawled under his bed sheets.
“I’m so sorry,” I squealed, brushing the granules onto the floor, collecting into a pile on a pair of crumpled Supreme boxers.
“Oh crap,” I apologized again. He just laughed, grabbed my foot, and kissed it.
“Crunchy toes,” he guffawed. He bit my big toe.
“This little piggy went to the market. This little piggy stayed home.” He licked the sole of my foot. I wrenched my leg away.
“Tickles!”
We kissed for a long time. I was afraid his ex-Marine dad would walk in and catch us. We were fourteen, so we had to be sneaky, but our predilection for recklessness, and our desire for closeness, outweighed any consequence. It was all carpe diem. Quickies behind the high school dumpster before drama club. Sloppy french kisses in his garage behind the stolen stoplight. Hand stuff underneath the table in fashion class.
My mom picked me up promptly at 4:30. She handed me a Larabar. Asked how the beach was.
“It was really beautiful. High tide.”
He called me later that night hyperventilating. Between wet gasps, he explained that he “borrowed” his mom’s car to pick up ketamine from the unhinged Snapchat dealer he frequently bought from. Everything had gone swimmingly until he tried to park upon arriving home. To correct his botched parking job, he forgot to put the car in reverse, and ended up crashing the Subaru into the side of his parents’ red ranch. The house was fine, just some chipped paint, but the hood of the car had a fat dent, and he hit his head on the steering wheel.
He was possibly concussed, for the fourth time that year. The first time he accidentally whipped his head back while we were sharing a cigarette in front of a church, ramming his skull into a stone wall. The second time, he fell while trying to climb through a window at an abandoned asylum. The third was on purpose: in a fit of rage he punched a hole into his bedroom wall, and subsequently slammed his head into the door.
I assured him it could’ve been much, much worse. Imagine this had happened on the road? Like, rear ending another car. Or Into a storefront? He didn’t have a license, and he was definitely moderately stoned. He always was. And he agreed. The concussion was confirmed the next day at Urgent Care. He showed up to my 4th of July party a couple days after wearing Gucci sunglasses for the post-TBI light sensitivity.
I broke up with him when we were 18. I still loved him dearly, but the final straw was a stunt he pulled on an Instagram Live, wherein he had made an attention-seeking display of drinking a shot of Windex.
Miraculously, he was fine, but for the next week he kept bragging about how his esophagus had chemical burns and he could only eat broth and drink iced tea. I refused to kiss him for days.
“You can’t keep doing shit like this,” I said gently. We were sitting at a graveyard we frequented in our hometown, smoking a tightly rolled joint. I had prepared myself for this moment. I even brought a carefully typed letter explaining the precise reasoning for my departure.
“But baby, I’m immortal.”
And it did feel true, at the time. In his 18 years, he survived a house fire, several suicide attempts of various methods, accidental overdoses, compound concussions, serious nose bleeds (from being broken and excessive nose drugs), fender benders, infected stick and pokes.
A cat has a supposed nine lives. This kid had used up at least twenty.
It was best this way. We remained close friends. I moved away to Texas, then moved back to New York. He studied abroad in Italy. There, he tried jumping out his dorm window, crashed his bike, hitch-hiked with strangers. We had regular FaceTime gossip sessions. We shared salacious details of our romantic escapades:
How big were her tits? OMG. Bruh. he’s a Jew AND uncircumcised? Fr?
Then he got in another car accident. This time, he was not responsible for the crash. A friend of his was speeding in his Mustang and spun out, hitting a lamp post. The friend was unscathed. Apparently, he bought a new Mustang the next week with his daddy’s money, which would be his third Mustang in three years. My ex-lover, however, was fucked. Herniated discs, broken bones, organ damage. He sent me selfies beaming from the hospital room. He texted me smugly:
I’m immortal.
He walked with a cane from then on out. His drug use never actually ceased. Neither did his proclivity for peril. In fact, after the accident, there was a marked uptick in his usage. He attended NA for a brief stint but was never sober. He slept with a roster of Cluster B women. A girl he met at NA drove him home after a meeting and hit a baby deer on the road. He drank himself into a coma every night. Tweeted insane things.
I tried to set him up with two of my roommates, but he was too tweaked for their taste. He attended a Bladee concert in Queens with us. Cane in tow. He did so much ketamine at the concert that we had to drag him into the Uber by his discontinued Drain merch. When we got back to our apartment, he locked himself in the bathroom for an hour. He emerged in a fog, sat down at the kitchen table, rummaged through his DG fanny pack he bought on Grailed, and accused us of stealing the rest of his MDMA.
The last night I ever saw him, he almost cancelled our plans. It was the day before my birthday. I was staying over at my parents’ place back in our hometown. My dad was cooking dinner: kielbasa and sauerkraut.
I’m sorry bro I had to call out sick from CVS…I’m having problems with my esophagus idk what goin on but I will do my best to see you tonite. gotta nap. will txt when i wake up love u
He did come. He arrived doused in sweat wearing a backpack.
“I ran over here. Like 7 miles. Happy Birthday,” he said, breathless. I was skeptical of the 7 miles bit, but I embraced him warmly.
“It’s so good to see you. Come in. Want some wine?”
“Yes. Hold on. I gotta piss so bad.”
We ate dinner around a blazing fire pit with my dad, drinking Gruner Veltliner out of thin stemmed glasses, careful not to knock the glasses onto the asphalt of the driveway. Last year, at a similar dinner outside with the three of us, we drank Prosecco out of champagne flutes my family never used and had been gathering dust in a curio cabinet. All three of the glasses shattered, but we were too drunk and jovial to give a damn. This time, we were careful. Nothing broke.
After we had eaten our fill, my dad collected our plates and cutlery and went inside. My ex-lover and I stayed by the dying embers of the fire. I offered him a Marlboro 27. We sat and smoked. He asked me about my recent break-up. How I was holding up.
“I’m fine, it’s just weird, you know? You spend so much time with a person, and then…it’s over. I saw him the other day. It was like hanging out with a stranger. And he grew a mustache now.”
“I always thought that guy was, like, actually a faggot.”
“Hey! Takes one to know one.”
“Admit it, you love effeminate men.”
I laughed and threw my cigarette butt into the ashes of the pit. He pulled out an identical pack of 27s and handed me another. We fell silent for a moment. He stood up, brushing crumbs off his jeans.
“Come with me behind the garage.”
I stood and followed him. A little curious, but unassuming. He coughed. For having called out of work, he seemed in good health. He had allegedly sprinted here. He had a hearty appetite, ate two plates of kielbasa. A few glasses of wine. I felt tipsy, but I hadn’t eaten at all that day prior to dinner.
“What’s up?” I asked. He smiled. Sweetly. Boyishly. His baby blues glinted.
“Can I kiss you?”
“What?”
“Kiss you.”
We kissed. My mind went blank. I felt something but couldn’t quite pinpoint the emotion. His lips were warm. He pulled me in close. When he pulled away, I almost fell. It was the wine. Not the kiss. Right.
“What the fuck,” I said, wiping my chin with my sleeve. I glanced at him. He was tearing up.
“We haven’t done that since high school, you know.”
“I mean…yeah.”
“Can I do it again?”
I nodded. A strange delirium washed over me. Was I crashing out?
So much time had passed. So many lovers, sparks, and flames since extinguished. The wood chips beneath my Docs were moist. His jacket smelled of smoke from the fire pit. I had sauerkraut stuck in my back molars. His tongue twisted around mine the exact way I remembered it.
I don’t know what came over us. We never went back inside. We just stayed there, kissing. For eternity, actually. You might not believe me. But somehow, we both knew the big D “Death” couldn’t touch us if we stayed in the backyard. In between kissing, we’d smoke another cigarette. Our packs never ran out. You’d think they would, but they didn’t. There was infinite supply.
The sun never rose either. It was dark. It was January 3rd. It was the last day ever. It wasn’t a weird time loop. This wasn’t some Groundhog Day rip off. Nothing repeated. Nothing ended.
We simply stayed there. And stayed. And stayed. And stayed. Kissing. Breathing. Laughing like simpler times that were never actually simple, but a thick coating of nostalgia can trick anyone into thinking so.
He ran his hand through my hair and kissed my earlobe.
“Bitch, I told you I’m immortal,” he whispered.
For Devlin. In Memoriam.