I remember us best by the taste of popsicle sticks, not popsicles, just the sugary juice on cheap wood topped off with a joke written by someone who probably wants to die. We were a flash of pink stockings pulled up under mary janes and dirty knees, sipping lemonade cups in the back seats of your dad’s car, pointing at the streets as we went by while he and your mom faced off with stony silence, but we didn’t know or care. They were burning out while we were burning up, running out on piers and catching rabbits just to let them go. When my hamster died, you held me for longer than you had to and I swore you left your fingerprints on my back through my red sweater. Shuffling feet under desks and summer sun and seeing myself in the reflection of your sunglasses,when school starts and we learn about kings and queens, we argue over which of us gets the bigger throne. I’ve considered the way rocks form that way because of hundreds of years of the same wave hitting them the same way, and concluded that we are rocks and we are the sea and we’ve just learned to move with the same mind. Running through the forest behind my house in last week of the summer, we find an outcropping that leads down under a little cliff and you go down into it with your hair floating in a haze of humidity and I follow, I always do. We’re pressed together in the dark, looking up at the little hole we climbed through and you tell me in a serious voice that we’re going to run away, so I say I’ll come. It doesn’t matter where.