I remember the first time I met you. I remember it because I thought you were weird.
But, if we’re being honest, who wouldn’t? Even fourth graders know that when you’re going around in a circle saying your favorite fruit, you say something common and normal. Strawberries. Apples. Peaches.
But no, you looked up with your tangled, floppy hair and your running fingers and said, persimmons, like you knew you were going to be the kid pushed down on the playground later. Like you knew simple fruits would always be beyond you, just like our little town, just like our rusted fourth-grade classroom and its threadbare carpet. Your fingers constantly moved, picking at the loose threads of that carpet. I saw your hangnails from across the room; your left thumb was already bleeding. I remember looking down at my own chewed nails and being angry at myself. I didn’t want to be anything like you.
You were weird.
–
The second time I met you was a month later, on the playground after school, once all the other kids had gone home. I’d pretended to lose my red jacket by the monkey bars so I could have an excuse to be late if Mom forgot to pick me up. You’d crouched in the tanbark clutching a baby bird to your chest. It was dying, the kind of death even a fourth grader could see, shadowed in its crooked wings and the flies buzzing around it like they knew its flesh would empty soon enough.
Don’t touch it, I said to you, feeling stupid, but you looked at me, and all I could think was that you must have been peering into another world. Your cheeks were wet from tears, and your knees were cut from digging into the tanbark. You just clutched the bird closer to your chest like your heart was breaking.
My heart broke too, then, a little bit, because little birds should not know death so young and neither should little boys.
I asked you why you even cared, and you told me, because no one else will. And then, I saw in you a certain kind of goodness to love things that are unwanted: the kind that bears its teeth like steel, the kind that has you stand vigil over a bird as it shivers and dies, because it is a sad thing, to be your only mourner, to not have anyone to hold you as you grow cold. I thought you must have been what death looked like, but I didn’t say it out loud. I will never say enough of my thoughts about you out loud.
You stood there until your tears had seeped into the soil, and it was only then, after you wordlessly handed me my red jacket with a glance that made me feel like a persimmon with its skin peeled off, like a threadbare carpet picked apart, that you told me your name.
–
The third time I met you, we were laughing at the Star Wars posters you’d hung up when you were a kid and obsessed with Mace Windu and never got around to taking down. We laughed until the front door slammed, and your face went white in the way that I knew to hold my breath. You grabbed my hand and whispered, come on, and we climbed through the fire escape to the roof. I stayed quiet because I knew about being scared to bring people home because you didn’t know whether your mom was having a good day or a bad day, so I laid on my back with you and we made up stories about the constellations in the sky, shining heroes who fought battles against villains with claws and scales instead of skin and bones, heroes who got to come home after, and everyone was happy in the end. I asked you why you liked persimmons, and you told me persimmons taste different every time you try them. I laughed and asked why you would ever want that, and you said your greatest fear was that things would always stay the same. That was the night I first realized who you were, how you saw the world—as a place to climb out of, through the fire escape, to the stars.
–
The fourth time I held you as you sobbed in my arms outside the hospital lobby, your body shook like a leaf in a storm. I ran my fingers through your tangled hair and wrapped my arms over your back like I could hold you together with just my hands, hold you together as you shattered over and over again like a beer bottle thrown against a wall. I decided then that I loved you—this boy who breaks at the sight of dying birds and bent wings, who mourns the death of a father who cared with his fists and not his heart, who laughs at the sound of thunder and rain and smiles like sunlight, who loves persimmons because they are strange and unpredictable. You were my fire escape from the sounds of prescription bottles clinking on the counter and the look that entered my mother’s eyes on the days she wouldn’t get out of bed.
That night, I kissed you as if I were a girl who believed in love, and you kissed me back, and it was almost enough.
But I am the villain of the story, the monster on the hill, the one the hero must fight to win the battle and go home.
The next day, I woke up before you and saw the acceptance letter on the coffee table.
I begged you to stay. But you were always meant for more than our small town. You were always meant for more than me. You left me sitting at your table, looking out the window at the leafy tree in your backyard, dotted with orange persimmons.
