It was during that time that the bones sometimes rubbed so bare against one another and that if we, inadvertently it always seemed, failed to nourish the joints which held us together, the bone was so aware of this lacking, so completely forced to acknowledge the dryness where the place had once been moist with understanding that it lay lank and disconnected, separated, and held together by the finest of fine fibers, clinging only in hope of the strong muscle being rejoined, to feel the reunion and operation of the two again, to see the pair working again; to feel the motion of that swing; that cool perfect stride.

So it was then that our friendship would collapse and leave us empty and irreversibly alone, it always seemed, and trying to fill up the blank bleak bottomless stare by walking down the long street between our houses, tripping over the clumsy foothold of anger and falling over pieces of broken curb, creating soliloquies spoken under one's breath to the clear rush of wind under dark skies which explained fully this sudden abandonment while also cursing the other against the tear-chill and the wind-rushing, cursing the other for the dam they had placed into the stream; the other who had dared intervene in this perfect flow.

It was during the heart of that summer, there with the sunlight streaming, below the sea of the sky and all its colors gleaming, that the fine point of conflict was to be touched on the long road between your house and mine, and so we had sat by the road with our feet (made in our distraction) fully vulnerable to any cars which might happen by, and waited to reconcile ourselves to one another; waited to bask intermittently in this still gleaming realm between what had passed in the dark preface to this walking up and down the street between our houses and the unprecedented brightness of this now-moment and the two mingling together and the cool cool incline of the gradual indistinction between them and the sweet glaze of retrospect and the creeping realization of indifference and finally disconcern and that cool perfect stride all over again and our feet stretched out bare and vulnerable into the hot street over which we knew no cars ever really crossed. n