Losing Youth

I am overcome tonight with memories of the past. Little clips of silent movies, with songs from my yesterdays playing their soundtrack. The films are scratchy, washed out and incomplete. For the life of me I can't remember all the things that I want to. Like the exact day we met. Or when or how we first started hanging out together. I just remember being your friend. And how close I felt to you, from what seemed like the very beginning. I remember nights housesitting with you and talking about everything. Mostly music. But our conversations were like crazy quilts. Little pieces of our lives all got sewn together as we talked into the early hours of the morning. And I would feel giddy and exhausted as I drove away from you Aunts house in my little red car, as the night sky turned a lonely, dusty blue. I remember you coming over to lay in my bed and listen to my talk and sing to myself. We would nap together. Falling asleep slowly in the heavy haze of our careful balance of innocence and temptation. I remember jumping playground fences and breaking into hotel pools. Laying in new summer grass with you, making childlike plans for a make believe future. Your smile, your eyes, the warm sound of your comforting words and the sweet bubbling of your laugh. You were my best friend.
I want to go back! I want to go back to the days before your lips ever touched mine. Before we ever crossed the line from curious to confused. Before things changed. Before I lost two years with you. Before I realized I would never get that time back. I play our old CD's and I sing along alone. All the songs we used to scream together, speeding down the highway with all the windows down and no fear. Just that sweet and burning wonder of what if, that later gave way to why not.
I miss the sunburnt days of our tender friendship before all of this. When the mornings after I stayed up talking to you were still crystaline and clean. I can't get back there. I can't undo all that has transpired between us two. And while I can't pick a single memory that I could live without, I wish somehow that things had never changed. I wish that I could have stayed 18 with you on that playground forever. Lost in the surrender of youth and music and honesty. We were open and giving of ourselves in a way that only the unwounded young souls can be.

"We spent the night on razor's edge, all innocence and sin. Now I'm strung out on the bowery as the winter closes in..."