Hi Julie:

When I heard the news, I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I hopped in my car. I think I just meant to head to the gas station for a six-pack and then hang out by Sherman Falls to think a bit, but then I cranked up the playlist and twenty songs later I was in the Bronx, parking in the old neighborhood—Hillside Homes. I think I knew right away it was a mistake to come, but what’s another mistake, right? Not the first, won’t be the last, not for me at least.

I parked the Jeep on Wilson and headed down the concrete path to where the tunnels split, and you can take the stairs to Fish Avenue.  It seemed every building held a memory. On the right, 3470 where the Rossis lived—how many of them were there, fifteen or so? Then 3468, where I first alighted from Queens after my mom died. On the left, 3466 where Peter Peg Leg’s mom would throw down singles and change for the ice cream man.  Shit, Julie, that was forty years ago. Saying that is as surreal as a Salvador Dali painting.

I made a left, went through the tunnel under Sammy Chu’s apartment and into the Cherry Blossom Court. It’s the best time of year to be there, the pink blossoms floating in the breeze and falling to cover the ugly pavement. Unfortunately, they had just mowed the grass so that nasty smell of bleeding chlorophyll overwhelmed the blossoms. The people in Connecticut can’t understand how much I hate that smell. Mown grass is the perfume of suburbia. Another reason to hate it.

The field in the center of the court looks different and everything looks so much smaller. I mean, I remember coming up to bat and thinking how far I would have to hit the ball to make it over the fence. Now, I look at it and I don’t see how we didn’t break the window of every apartment that faced that field.

The monkey tree is still alive. I’m not kidding. Remember that day when we were all hanging on that one branch together and we heard the creak. Tariq was like, “Oh, shit,” but before we could let go the tree just keeled over.  I fell on my face, you landed on my back, and Sammy broke his wrist.  Remember the panic we were in trying to concoct a story that didn’t involve climbing a tree his mother specifically told him not to climb? Man, I sometimes think that making up excuses for the stupid shit we did is what kick-started my career as a writer. We knew we had to be tough to live in Cherry Blossom, and that tree was no exception. It has spent the last forty years growing horizontally, like the world’s thickest vine.

It was tough to see it that way, though. I wanted it to be standing tall. Maybe I wanted it to be dead and gone. Somehow, beyond my admiration at its clinging to life, there was something pathetic about it as well, spread out with its limbs vainly reaching upward as if it wanted the sky to pick it up.

I wanted it to look exactly like it did the first day I met you. That was when my family moved to Hicks and had the garden apartment with the little yard.  I came outside, and there you were, hanging upside down on the limb we eventually overloaded with miscreants. I liked your upside-down smile, and the three feet of jet-black hair that fell nearly to the grass below those sparkly almond eyes.  How hard did I crush, Julie?  Diamonds, but you knew that.

You won’t be surprised to know that I actually knocked on the door of my old apartment. There was an older black woman living there with her grandson, who was probably the same age we were when I first saw you. She was so welcoming when I explained why I knocked, and invited me in.  I told her I just wanted to stand in the yard and didn’t want to disturb them, but she insisted, and made me eat one of her chocolate chip cookies and tell her about what Hillside looked like when I lived here.  She was nice, but the apartment was suffocating and brought to mind too many nope moments for me to stand. It was weird how much of the furniture was arranged exactly how it was when I lived there. There was a recliner by the front door, black, not brown, and the couch lined up along the left wall, with a lamp behind it. How many times had I read by the light, hearing my father moaning in his needle dreams in the next room? I politely said my goodbyes and walked—calm on the inside but every fiber in my legs wanting to run—out into the yard.

I could almost see us rehearsing on the slate tiles, the amp plugs running into my kitchen window. Tariq on guitar, with his dreads tucked into his tam, and you, resplendent in a peasant blouse and skirt, with a million scarves on your mic stand. Me, cringeworthy in a guayabera—what was I thinking? If ever I deserved one of Tariq’s “stupid white boy” cracks, it was when I wore that shirt.

While I was standing there, my mind in 1980, don’t you know a security guard ambled down the path, gave me a nod, and then headed into the back door of the laundry room. That was your favorite way to go home, even though it felt like backtracking to me. We always took different paths to the same place. Like in high school, when everyone went their separate ways and you wound up at Art and Design and I went to Science. We just fell out of our routine, and out of each other’s lives. I swear, Jules, my breath caught the day Tariq and I were auditioning singers and you walked into the studio. You never told us you could sing before that. We had just heard a dozen of the worst yowlers ever. I felt like if I heard one more wannabe Whitney Houston oversouling “You Give Good Love,” I would scream. When you said you were going to do Roberta Flack, I panicked, because I didn’t know how I was going to tell you no when you inevitably sucked. I could never tell you no. I had already decided that I was going to make Tariq do it when you stepped up to the mic and opened your mouth. That angelic voice grabbed my soul, and ripped it out of my body. That was the end of auditions, and you were in the band.

\You and I were a thing for five minutes, but we were much better as friends than lovers. I still can’t hear Roberta Flack without thinking of you.

Well, I think I have babbled enough. I have to tell you one more thing, though.  As I walked out of the yard, and past the monkey tree, I spotted something in the grass. It was a piece of phyllite. I guess it isn’t surprising. The field is full of it, but it just reminded me of the time we were hanging out the day before your Bat Mitzvah and you were so nervous. You found a piece that had so many stripes in it you said it looked like fudge swirl ice cream—you were so fascinated with it. When I said it was phyllite you teased me for days about being a nerd. From then on, I was Professor Tom.

I stuck the phyllite in my pocket and headed back to the Jeep.

The ride back was longer. I finally broke down when I saw Candlewood Lake, and New Fairfield, where we once again reunited after decades running parallel in our solitary worlds.

It took me all night to write this. I really didn’t know what to say, I guess. If you were here, I would say I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you, and maybe I’m angry at you. Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you call someone?  It’s late. I’m going to try to sleep a little. Now that I’ve written this, I don’t know what to do with it. In the morning I’ll go to the cemetery. I want to put the phyllite on your headstone, and maybe tell you that I love you one more time.

Goodbye, Jules. You passed the audition.

WOW… I was just breath taken when I was saw her gallantly walking to the kitchen. Every single gesture was done so smoothly she was just so perfect. Her hair black like the night sky and long like a never-ending road. Her smile was as bright as a shooting star. She made my heart sink every time I saw her. When we would speak sometimes I didn’t even know what to say I would just gaze at her beauty if it were up to me. I thought to myself, “Who would even pay attention to me?” I couldn’t just throw myself on her she was to fragile I needed to have her but I don’t know how. We would lock eyes as if we were hypnotized because the Kipps wouldn’t allow this to ever happen. We began building up feelings and this fire that would burst inside like a volcano but yet we couldn’t. One day we smiled and talked, she made me as weak as a feather when I was next to her. I wonder if she felt the same. Unconsciously, I kissed her and surprisingly she was kissing me back. I closed my eyes as out lips hugged each other like a long never ending hug with some much love and intensity as if it were the last one….

Night had not yet overtaken the pastel sky, but the moon was already visible. It was not quite a full moon, but it was not a perfect crescent either. It was caught in an inelegant phase somewhere in between. As the hours passed and the heavens dimmed, the moon grew more brilliant, and it greeted the eventide with a radiance that upstaged every other celestial body with natural ease.

An aging man gazed at the twilit sky from his porch. His craggy face was wise and rugged, with hollows like craters and dark eyes that gleamed like distant stars. The moon had always captivated him. It had been forty-seven years since he had stepped foot on its gray surface.

He struggled to recall the details of his mission—the number of rock samples he had taken; which of his crewmates had performed the transposition, docking, and extraction maneuver; the name of the aircraft carrier that had recovered him upon his return to earth—but he remembered the feeling. How could he forget that overwhelming trepidation and unstoppable hope? There were thousands of ways the mission could have failed. The spacecraft could have caught fire at any moment. A single computer error could have derailed the entire expedition. He could have lost connection with his support crew and capsule communicator back on his home planet. But none of the doomsday scenarios could have quelled his confidence in the potential of humanity and his primal curiosity about the workings of the universe. Back then, there was no person or circumstance in the galaxy that could stifle his spirit.

But eventually, the time came for him to come back down to earth. Earth is the most pragmatic planet, with its matter-of-fact food chains and businesslike seasonal transitions. It was no place for the man’s burgeoning young mind full of wild stellar aspirations and ideals. Yet it is also the only habitable planet, so the man had no alternative but to remain grounded on its dependable, safe, overfamiliar crust. The earth-dwellers welcomed him back with cheers and pride. He settled down in a decent neighborhood in a satisfactory state in an acceptable country on a tolerable earth. He fell in love with a moderately worldly woman and married. He bought a midnight blue house with a veranda with a reasonably attractive view of the stars. He sunk into a life of terrestrial mundanity and routine. It gradually ate away at his optimism until his soul was a dying star that gave birth to a black hole that had such powerful gravity it prevented any light from escaping.

The only thing that consoled him was his nightly ritual, the only ritual he enjoyed. At sunset every evening, he would wait for the moon to emerge. He closed his eyes and recollected the sensation of his feet touching the dusty crevices of the lunar landscape. He cherished the memory of looking at earth from hundreds of thousands of miles away and waving stupidly as if all of humanity could see him and collectively wave back. He remembered the soft, silvery haze that had shrouded his landing site and filled his heart with mystery. And in that fleeting moment, the gleaming orb in the sky didn’t seem so far away.