We’d been in the car most of the afternoon and saw the rooftop first when we crested the ridge. Then yellow. And finally, the fluffing green of the lawn and, finally again, the drab of gravel and we were there. Like so many times after we held hands walking inside. I can still feel that palm.
We started digging through the box of VHS tapes about an hour before sundown. It was June so must’ve been between seven and eight. Took a break to watch that big fireball paint everything pink then went back to the diggings. And then we found it, the one I said I’d hoped for was still there. A whole block of SNICK, commercials and all, from, probably, 1993. I didn’t remember the Bigfoot pizza; still don’t. But Donny did and missed it. So, I did too. I think, or hope, whichever, we still do and maybe soon we can make one of our own. Maybe even make the little plastic paper wrapper holder uppers. That’s how he described them, and I remember that so fucking well.
What we wanted most to watch was an episode of The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Donny’d thought of it because it was about Baltimore, well its football team anyway, the old, old one. The Colts. The 1958 championship game. And space. And magic. Especially, though, how something that really does happen down can reverberate on and on into the universe, an inverse of our seeing the stars, right now, of the million million years past. It’s a great episode. The usual Pete and Pete stuff, Artie: The Strongest Man…In the World, and an alien named Joe Jonas is the new kid in class. Twenty-two well spent minutes, thirty with those preserved commercials.
Big Pete Wrigley asked, “Doesn’t it mean anything to you that the first three letters in ‘Unitas’ are the same as the first three letters in ‘Universe?’” Well, no. Just goofy fun tv shit. But isn’t that what love is? Giddily happy flickering lights that we’d best appreciate. Argue with the likes of love and you’re just saying fuck you to life itself. And that’s just goofy in all the dumb worst ways.
After Pete and Pete and Johnny U we put a Dieselboy CD, 6ixth Session, in the player so we could dance. It’s a long one so we got to dance a good while. Later that summer we’d eat ecstasy and be all dancey the whole night through. But that first night doing that it was just drums, bass, and us. Plenty of enough. When the disc finally stopped, we walked up the stairs to the first small spare bedroom. From the window there we could climb out onto the roof. Looking out on the intermittent cars on bisecting backroads, the longish distance neighbors’ lights, the highway down in the valley, we could see the lower constellations of lights. And up above, of course, well, you know.
“See that star way out there?”
“Uh…that one?”
“No, the other one.”
“Oh, that one?”
“No, no, that smaller one tucked kinda in the middle of ‘em.”
“Oh. Yeah. Ok, what about it?”
“Just look at it.”
“Ok…”
“….”
“See how it gets brighter the longer you look?”
“……Yeah.”
“That’s how you make me feel.”
“…..?”
“Bigger, brighter. Something more. Because of you.”
“….”
“…..”
“Thank you.”
***
They sat there, shoulder to shoulder, and sometimes one or the other leaning back, talking, about everything, a clear sky count-the-candy-in-the-jar full of stars, waiting to see if a random one might fall in its last light glorious sprint. Then, the only warning of what was to come was a small instruction.
“You should lie back again,” she said. And he did.
She carefully, partially undressed; both of them. A mix of excitement and consideration for the scrapey surface they were on. She straddled him and found that sometimes meteors can be seen looking down. Her knees grazing the shingles where the clothes she’d taken off had jumbled up, leaving roof exposed. The back of him. Her palms pressed against it when she leaned down. The pitch tar black of the roof can become a universe. Sparks, blinks, streaks, and glints. Open mouth moans and open-closed eyes casting specks of light like stars. A moment is just a moment and it is also all eternity. He looked up at her as she moved, framed by universe, the Milky Way breathed in unison with them, and every twinkle way up there danced like they did to Dieselboy before.
If the stars were watching, as they almost certainly were, they might’ve thought of themselves as a switched-up Shakespeare verse, here they all were brought back together to this earth, again, reforming a Romeo with the assistful hands of this other generation’s Juliet.
Back inside later they’d take inventory of themselves. His ass dotted gently black, and her palms constellated with tiny darkstar specks of roof. Little black tickertape tar bits of confetti, like candy sprinkles on birthday cake skin.
“Do you think the aliens saw us?”
“I don’t know if they saw it but in time, they will feel the energy we gave.”
“I’ll take it. I loved it, you’re even better than Unitas.”
“I hope you don’t say that to all the girls.”
“Only one.”
“I’ll take it,” she winked.
He asked to see her palms again and gently traced a “U,” a horseshoe constellation, of tiny speckles.
“Ya know, with the right kind of eyes, you can see their helmet decal in there,” he said of the specks embedded in her other hand. And then softly plucked them all away.
Here and then gone, like everything, like the Baltimore Colts.
Yeah, gone, but also always here. Always somewhere. Somewhere forever.
“What do you think Joe Jones is doing right now?”
“Out there?”
“Yeah, waaay out there.”
“Maybe he’s watching football…”
A head nods in the pause.
“…and it’s finally 1958 where he is.”
“I like that, I hope it is.”
“But it still won’t be all good for him.”
“No?”
“No. Someday, he’s gonna see Johnny Unitas finish in San Diego.”
Two simultaneous sighs in the blinking black of night.
***
Yes, there is a horseshoe constellation. Another oddity in our deeply weird universe. Its amorphousness left it uncharted until the summer of 2001. It can be seen on any clear night. Yes, even from Indiana. Or San Diego. But only when traced across the glitterpaper sky with two fingers outstretched from a couple’s clasped hands. It is always far enough away to ease any worldly hurt. And close enough to illuminate anything that we might love.
***
It was a big thing for me. Finally, someone I thought so high of didn’t think of me as just this joke. I still haven’t forgotten it. Still feel it. Still feel her. There’s this warmth, an energy, I can feel it on my arms, a heat of something coming, an impending starburst. And maybe it can happen all over again.
***
We sought what we thought everyone else sought, sex and ecstasy and other same things as stars. Universes, us, made of stars, dusts and matter and hums, gravitational pulls, sex and ecstasy, light and all these little magics, all these stars from afar, yes yes yes, the same. And that hum, soft underneath, the still felt nearness in spite of apartness, I’m not just asking this all you gods, I am telling you, let it be really here again. It is time.
***
Nothing is forever. Except distance. And maybe coldness. That just seems to expand. Houses burn, roofs collapse, hearts shatter. Even the best ones. But, for now, some moments still last, like old TV reruns in the middle of a night. And some words, spoken just once, no text just breath’d sentences and pauses, little mini poems shared somewhere, I can hear them still. Like songs.
“You know how sometimes everything is all nice and good?”
“…Yeah…”
“I like that.”
“…”
“…”
“Me too.”