My life is scattered with you, the versions of you held in my greying heart.
Milk in bottles, on our desks, and you opposite, reflected in the glass, your ginger hair, milky skin, shy.
Your favourite team was Dundee United, I remember that.
You writing that.
I think we were in the same group. We were in the same group.
I wore a heavy brown duffel coat: you, the tangerine of your team.
I told you about my pets. About brown trout flicking silver in the burn near our house. About catching them in my hands and trying to keep them in a pond I built myself.
But somehow they swam out anyway, sensing that time doesn’t stand still. You had a dog (did you? Back then? )
Then that time in class when someone did a handstand and knocked over the Unifix cubes. They spilled everywhere, scattering our childhood counting across the classroom floor.
The night before, just the night before, a wee boy was knocked down and killed outside the church-hall.
His cousin was in our class.
The day of the Unifix cubes, the teacher was so sad, she lost her temper and belted the boy for his handstands. She cried, and belted him, and cried again.
I saw you then, too. I think I saw you then. Were you that boy? I don’t think you were.
Even though I could only have been eight, I felt the pain of the whole world that day.
My memory shifts like clouds.
*
And then high school – the first few years blurry, as I lost you a wee bit, seeing you mostly on the bus when the big boys smoked and burned the seats and jumped out the fire doors at the back, high on the fumes of adrenaline.
I ran off into teenage hormones, shoplifting iridescent lipstick, wearing oil slick stilettos, puffball skirts, and drinking cider. I missed you those few years. They weren’t my finest hour.
And then,
I remember toast.
And the smell of purple haze at gigs. Buying vinyl.
I remember sitting on your roof, listening to you play guitar as if we were in some sort of American film. I remember the building of shaky bridges on days when tarmac melted ink.
Millport in the rain and waves high enough to sweep us beyond the day, and you running through them.
Did you? Did you run through them? I think you did.
My memory shifts like tides.
*
I left home then. Ran off to a place with a beach and people I didn’t know, where I didn’t fit.
I was too angular, showing the sharp corners of our school, of smokers’ corners and stick-and-poke tattoos and knives in the bushes around.
But you came to guide me through that. We went to balls, like interlopers: a shock of red and brown corduroy among formalwear.
I studied and learned. I travelled. I came home to you. I could speak other languages, but you could always understand me, even when you couldn’t.
Our friend buried his dad. Our friend buried his mum.
The soundtrack of that time is homemade mix tapes and your breath as you reached for chords on a classical guitar. Reaching for some lost thing.
Were you reaching? It feels like you were. I think you were.
My memory shifts like music.
*
And then suddenly -
Suddenly -
A breathless non-stop rabble of drunken, joyous weddings, of adulthood, of beautiful babies smelling like warm gorse on a summer’s day, of house-flits, of new jobs and next jobs and bills, of wine replacing snakebite, of bear-suits, of you on stages across the world, of sudden grief, of laughter, of years passing so quickly.
So quickly.
Of growing up, of us being separate but welded together through the prism of that milk bottle.
Were you happy running through all this? I think you were. I hope you were.
You were always the athlete. I was always in the crowd.
My memory shifts like teenagers.
*
And here we are, my oldest friend.
We sit together on the beach, you and I, with all these versions of ourselves, watching the ebb. The flow. The tide.
My hair, grey, yours, gone.
I’ve learned the names of birds, their migration patterns, and the fragility of their journeys. You’ve learned the chords of every song your village wants to sing and you hold that dancing space, for older us, and fill it with such goddamn joy.
There’s nothing we need to say, no version we need to be. There’s just us. It’s cliché.
But still so much to do. A lifetime left.
To share with you.
We’ll go on still, singing, burning toast, crying at the shattered beauty of dawns and sunsets.
My memory shifts like time.