It is summertime
In the 90s before the internet
and nine year old me is sitting on the couch with Ben, my best friend, who has a bowl cut
Like I do and I asked Ben what he wants to do and Ben says what he always says:
I don’t know dude, what do you wanna do?
And I don’t know either because it’s already two months in the summertime
and we have done everything we think we can do,
played basketball so many times Ben knows I will never go left
Stayed up until midnight to watch the r-rated VHS tapes my mother owns, pulled each other around in a wagon
Toilet papered every house on the street except for our own
And so we turn on the television and Indiana Jones is playing and afterwards we go outside
Because there is no internet and we stare at the big tree on our Street
the tree that is bigger than Ben’s entire house that we have never been able to climb because we are little kids, but now
We are little kids that just watched Indiana Jones
and so we find some old bungee cords
and the hooks of those bungee cords find themselves into our belt loops and we tie the other side’s around the tree and now we are
Halfway up the tree, that is bigger than Ben’s entire house
and I quietly think to myself: maybe I am Indiana Jones.
and Ben quietly thinks to himself
maybe
This is a bad idea
And my belt loops quietly think to themselves, what the fuck
But we were all thinking quietly
And so for a moment, it is silent and at nine years old I transform into things I have never been before
An astronaut floating in space,
the hummingbird buzzing in place,
a beam of August light floating through the windows
and then I hear a crack which is not Indiana Jones’s whip
but my belt loops snapping apart shrieking relief
and I fall all the way down the tree onto my back
and Ben rushes down and says, are you okay?
and I say,
I think so
and Ben starts to laugh and I start to laugh and I’m bleeding from my elbow, but it’s just a scrape
And that means that I am human and we are alive here tonight and we sit
Quietly till my mother comes searching