Dandelions

-He stares at her, a gaze that almost speaks of friendship and whispers something about kindred souls. They’re too young to understand. When she tells him her joke, he laughs hysterically, though he doesn’t quite get it and the truth is, if he did, he wouldn’t think it funny, but he’d laugh anyway. Deep behind it, a yearning, a wish, though unuttered or understood by either of them. It is the wish, more his than hers, that the friendship in his gaze, reciprocated by her outward actions, were more than the mere circumstance of being classmates, of sitting on the same bench, of being the midgets on a playground of giants.
She runs off. It’s her turn to kick the ball. She’s one of the best athletes he’s ever seen. He’s never even been off the bench. But he knows she loves him. Love in the way it is first learned and used. And she loves him in the same way that she loves kickball, in the same way that she loves pizza-she does, and she’s told him often; in the same way that she loves dandelions, even when they are no more than white seeds in parachutes that fall apart in the wind. But more than anything, she loves him in the same way she loves petals, those of fully formed flowers, the ones she pulls out one by one while singing to herself, letting them fall below her and be trampled on. He does not realize any of this, he does not understand, nor does she, but there’s a sense that if they had time, they would both become aware. That day with the splitting of a cookie, they disappeared. They became less than memories to each other. Almost as if the other had never existed.
He studies her, it is her. It has been years since the last time he stood before her or her before him, the two a short distance from each other. His mind has not been still since the last words between them, though neither he nor she recalls them. Time has not been kind to him, though still young, it is as if his mind has lost pace with his spirit and the questions come all too easily. It feels heavy, his head. Even as he walks around the playground, adrift and alone in the multitude, a nomad in the concrete desert, his fatigue grows, from the weight of his head, the carrying of it on his shoulders. He smiles at her, as they sit, not too far from each other. He would speak to her, but with which words? He does not know how to speak, not to her, not to that which a forgotten memory tells him is heavenly. So he thinks of all the things he would like to tell her. Sometimes this makes him smile, mostly it leaves him feeling empty, as he can scarcely utter a single word to her.
As they sit two desks away from each other in two classes, five or six years after their initial awareness of each other and subsequent loss of each other’s permanence, the latent impression of childhood gains density; weight. He wonders what this means. A child, raised on movies and television, he wants to believe in signs, in fate and serendipity. His mind, its memory, is flooded with moments and signs, not his own, but rather those signifying plot points, act breaks and denouement. Movies. He doesn’t know about structure and he confuses all of this, in memory, for a reality he hasn’t yet found. Interpreting the latent memory of childhood emotion as a sign. He sits, a desk away from her, smiling but never turning to face her, waiting for another sign, a moment that will make things clear. It doesn’t come, even as he sits there restlessly, so near her. Words run through his head loudly, but refuse to come out, even as a whisper. Then, had he found breath enough to speak to her, he might have said those three words, he didn’t understand but wanted to give her. At the time, had he used those words, he would have meant something between an affinity for dandelions and an affinity he’ll never quite comprehend. But he never said anything.
One day, feeling like a child to the child he was, even then, he scribbled seven words in a question, on a scrap of paper. Folding the scrap, he let it fall and dance on her desk. He walked around the class, looking for a crevice in which to crawl. He found none. When he returned to his chair, on his desk he found his question with an emphatic reply, underlined and exclaimed by points. Why would she? he thought. His consciousness lapsed at that point. He never formed a memory of that moment, after being left alone in that classroom. He’s never remembered leaving, just being left.
There are two things he’s associated with that year, a certain solitude and empty words. Near the end of that year, though they had hardly spoken, if ever they did, she mentioned to someone, “Kevin’s my friend, he knows he’s my friend.” At which point he wondered, how he would have known that.
He walks into a coffee shop. He’s older. He recognizes the barrista. She smiles when he opens the door and walks in. She greets him. He tells her he’s ok, it’s what’s expected, and he orders. She smiles as he pays and tells him to have a nice day. He knows she loves him in the same way she loves dandelions and their petals. He walks out with his coffee and he knows this is when the character disappears. He knows structure. This is perhaps, closure.