revisiting adolescence

memory of sandbox love

[I have 33 subscribers. my mother had me at 33!]

my favorite film series of mine is adolescence, a collection of olympus analog point-and-shoot scenes I shot in high school.

one image sits in my car, below the radio. it’s a haphazard group photo. it’s Celeste’s surprise 17th birthday party. captured are people I’d known since the age of 12, 11, 5.

liquid stains and artifacts from my dad’s at-home developing process

nathaniel, 2020

aditee, nick, phoebe, olivia and celeste pose for a picture

one of them I met at the age of three. in pre-school, nicholas was subjected to being my first kiss. I ran up to him, planted a peck, and ran off.

jai lifts celeste bridal style

The non—consensual PDA from seventeen years ago has nothing to do with nick’s homosexuality. but we found humor in the irony come middle school.

nick & I shared an orbital plane. someone who I was always conscious of, an old playground friend who quipped jests with me during passing period in junior high [one time he called the gap between my bracketed teeth ‘the great divide’. absolute killer]. he played in the school band with my good friends.

for as long as I noticed my life passing by, I watched his track run parallel to mine.

nick & emilie, who’s house hosted the surprise party

his death was unexpected, abrupt, and unequivocally unfair. the consequence of a routine minor surgery — it made the news fucking absurd. his memorial service was an pre-mature high school reunion only a year after we graduated in 2021.

celeste turned 17 in January 2020, making her surprise party one of my last close contact functions in high school before six feet social distance.

nick performed a social save at that party — when a frenemy showed up, he took my hand and sought us refuge in a tiny bathroom [‘let’s go make out,’ he said]. we sat with the door locked, laughing at the prospect of what a boy and a girl behind a locked door means in any other heteronormative context.

i insisted we run outside and view the sunset

it is frustratingly unjust that my track crosses the horizon after the end of his line.

now nick’s image rides with me under the radio, against an eternal pink sky, with aditee, ysabelle, olivia, tsion, phoebe and jai.