(eight or nine) years later, and yet here you are, almost able to touch her sienna skin, which on that day, was contrasted by that incandescent, not-white-not-yellow-hued shirt that she always wore, and you can still see her thick eyebrows at clement angles, and her smile wide and earnest because it was always wide and earnest (then), so innocent and childlike; and she responds in the affirmative, that the day will be lumped together with others that are similar to it, but, when she speaks, her voice is that of the jaded and weary woman she became, not the little, cherubic girl in the relatively early stages of puberty — even though this is not how you would have referred to her then because the word, puberty, was never uttered — it was summed up in all of the adolescent dramatics that were so important at the time, the dramatics that probably dominated most of the conversation that day, even if they have by now peacefully died so long ago that even the question of when seems absurd to you — you, a nineteen your old kid watching through your own eyes: the past you (fourteen or so, awkward in his skin, gangly and pudgy at the same time) and her paired off within a larger group of friends all feeling the burden of the mid-summer doldrums and walking through a construction zone, kicking at pebbles and chunks of gleaming asphalt that almost melt in the imperious presence of the summer sun, thinking 'The air smells of freshly cut grass and truck exhaust'—; of that one midnight tryst, which begins with a silent and serpentine escape from a bedroom window, the one that ends at some park — on a structure that was called just that (a structure), as if the people who decide the names for these types of things in this case went with the obvious or were too tired or were militant acolytes of Grice's theory of inference — with the full moon coating the dew in a milky luminescence, and her face now a ghostly sepia swimming in the clouds of smoke that burn off the cigarettes she stole from her mother; you smoke the contraband with her, and you feel sick, but you keep smoking anyway because you're telling her about the girl(s) that you like (not just like, but “like-like”), because you don't want to use the word “infatuated,” and you tell yourself it's because you're not entirely sure whether you're supposed to be infatuated with ______ or infatuated by _____, or if the two are actually grammatically distinct (whereas you are either elated by the presence of the person because of some carnal/spiritual/emotional/whatever desire or damn near intoxicated by the very idea of that one special someone, who you are too spineless to approach in earnest, respectively; but yet there you are, not only approaching, but with them, the like-liked, and you can't tell her that you like-like her because it would be an act of temerity, one that might jeopardize whatever it is you have going; so you extol Option B — the girl by whom you are intrigued more than infatuated — and predicate upon her all of the desirable qualities you see in the person in front of you in the hopes that there be some kind of tacit understanding, that there will be some revelation on her part, that she will see that the whole exercise is a charade, a kind of acrostic foreplay). We sit on the structure for more than an hour, and I keep thinking, how do you kiss someone? In the movies, it begins as a shared silence, a consenting smile. But there's none of that. She tells me to just tell the girl that I like her, but it's not that easy. I may only be twelve, but I already know that it isn't that easy. Maybe when you grow up you can do that. Maybe in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles you can walk into a nice bar or a coffee house and order a drink for a girl and then talk to her and then go back to your house and just do it. And as you continue to exchange stories something strange happens. The death — the moment when a person ceases to be past, present, and potentiality, and becomes shared past and inanimate present — cases to be something abstract; it becomes more real. You realize that you cannot grasp mortality or infinity or eternity; all you can understand is loss, which is something of a Kantian way of going about things. And you know that the images and memories have become the person's identity. And yet you wish to fight it. Because she was more. And you fear that some will construct that person, that 'her' whom you love and cherish, out of the eulogy and the obituary and the pale, stiff corpse animated only by half-truths. You fear that her progeny will now define her, and that her progeny will be limited to the memories the community has and will have of her. Not only will you lose her in life, you will lose her in death, too. Because there's so many excisions, so much that is omitted. —We are not here to manufacture a god, I think. The casket is lowered into the Earth. My suit doesn't fit quite right. Looking around, I notice that everyone else my age is wearing ill-fitting suits and what appear to be cocktail dresses that were thrown on simply because of their dolorous color. And yet you said nothing. You just gripped the one memory, warts and all, that much tighter. It was the first thing you thought of when the call came. It seemed as though it was almost there with you, that imposing chimera. You remember the walk to the apartment on Eckford Street before the subsequent day's ride down to Baltimore: The city is silent, but the City is magically illuminated in the distance: illustrious steel and pale concrete. There's a six-pack of beer in each of my hands, and I know they will both end up in the same place before ending up in the place all liquid rentals go. This one striking image of her continues to resonate in my head; it appears each time I blink in a way no less vivid than those phosphines that pulse and dance whenever you rub your eyes too diligently. I can't understand why it's taken primacy over all of the millions of other moments that her and I shared, many of which seem to be so much more significant. It's not even that it best describes her; it's just there, haunting me not quite to the level of apparition-grade shadowing or Chopin-nocturne harrowing, but there. Unavoidable. And because it's there without the conscious desire to put it there, it seems only natural to revere the memory and focus upon it in the hopes of making it that much more vivid, perhaps so vivid that it is granted the ability to converse and explain the reason why the “off a building” was not preceded by “slipped” or the passive “was pushed,” but instead is that single invidious word that everyone seems to avoid, to eschew, to replace with ellipses. Everyone is thinking it, though: me and Dave (one of her ex-boyfriends, whom I had met once or twice before) up here in Brooklyn, those back in Baltimore; it resonates with the Boston contingent, those who have gone to state schools in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan, even the nocturnal and talpidic creatures who seem to have retreated into obscure and cavernous regions unknown to all but the most hermetic. “Jumped” (as in willful, as in preventable, as in why were you not there?). And it's inching close to midnight now, the only sounds being the echoing and flatulent choppers sputtering toward the Pulaski and the sirens in the distance and the dogs that speak in aggressive tones like drunk old men roused from sleep. The phone is finally in disuse, but the twenty or so conversations that have taken place over the course of the previous hours continue to occupy my thoughts. Five or six of the people I phoned I haven't spoken to in years. Some of them have changed; some of them haven't. No one has said anything all that profound as of yet, though plenty have made the attempt. It's not raining, but it would be better if it were. It would be more fitting, more dramatic. But there's no need for enhanced dramatics at this point, for those histrionics that need to be contrived by the truly narcissistic. And then you're back on the street. You are walking to get cigarettes, even if you don't smoke