solar eclipse

could i sit here and pretend i knew what he was thinking all those years ago, on the bottom bench of the orange lacquered bleachers of our squeaky, high school gym, scared and drenched in his own sweat?

i suppose i could. i suppose i don't need to pretend.

the boy who should have grown up next to us but his daddy was afraid to stick him in a taxi to send him off to the school across town, his dad convinced all taxi drivers were child molesters. the boy who started high school with us at the public school but after a short while transfered to the catholic school because their basketball program was way better, and he would get more exposure playing with a better team, get a free ride to university, which was probably true, and probably happened.

now he is grown and teaching school in a town i lived in only a few years back, living around the corner from my old flat, eating the same pizza and jogging the same riverside trails.

and whenever we return to the town where we grew up, at the same time, tucking ourselves in the awkward spaces of our childhood homes, we escape to the same bars with the same group of friends and acquaintances. like that Christmas he came back from Asia with all that hair and exuberance and I couldn't stop staring at him and it was too late because that boy on the bench had grown up and so had i, and our lives, when they did overlap, only overlapped for the briefest of moments, like a solar eclipse, and not enough for anything more than a vague acquaintance and a few isolated conversations, a handful a decade, where he dazzles me, having grown tall and learned to curb the teenage stink, and where perhaps, if i am lucky, i dazzle him too.