1:00 am

by Lucas Molina

It was painful to stand under the lamppost. The light feels soft to my eye, but just a gaze burns my heart with emotions that I simply don’t want to deal with yet.

So instead, I stand off to the side, right next to the bench. I won’t bother to sit. Just as the light burns, the bench would freeze. An image of us sitting, smiling, laughing, flashed through my mind. Its tiring, swatting those images away. Just being here makes them pop up, over and over again, nagging at me to remember, to recall, to bring back the times of old, when this was a happy place. Try as I might, I can’t help but smile as I stopped fighting, and let the memories begin to collect, and sit in my mind.

It was on this path where we first met. You, under the blinding summer sun, reading a book on the bench as though the heat wasn’t getting to you at all. Me, deciding it would be best to rest after walking for so long, sitting on the bench and desperately trying to keep it cool, and not doing a very good job at it.

I can’t remember the conversation. I doubt you do, either. It wasn’t about the book; I remember thinking an opener like that would be too cliché. I also remember thinking the weather was too laughably straightforward to be of any use as a conversation starter. I honestly don’t remember much about the beginning. At this point, I can only remember the end.

What did we say on our first date, at that café with the pink sign? I can’t recall. I know the skirt you wore gave me goosebumps every time I looked at it. I know the picture I took of you with the graffiti made my heart flip. I remember the wink you left me with all too well. I had stayed up all night wondering what it meant, if it meant anything at all.

Looking back now, it all seemed so trivial. You were just like that. A wink meant nothing; it didn’t have to mean anything. It was just a wink. But it had felt nice to daydream. To make up a reality in my head that I was sure wouldn’t come to pass. I was excited for the next weekend anyways.

The wind is picking up. It’s getting colder. Expected, given that its almost midnight. There are stores open, I could take shelter there. I prefer it out here though. The cold burns and gives me reason to take my mind out of the situation of where I stand into the flurry of memories that I feel whirring around in my mind. The memories start to pick up, just like the wind.

I remember going to your apartment for the first time. At night, the moonlight hits the window at just the right angle, it shines into your bedroom, and in your bed, sets a glow upon your sleeping frame, as though you were a princess in a fairy tale, waiting for her prince charming. I’ve slept long nights in that bed. More than I can count, and even still, more that I must have forgotten. 

I never told you how beautiful you looked. I’ll keep that to myself.

A person just walked past me. No doubt wondering what a guy is doing here in the middle of the night, staring solemnly at a lamppost, refusing to sit on a perfectly good bench. I wonder if he’s going somewhere important. Picking up some late-night snack, maybe. Walking home from work, most likely. Your apartment is in that direction, maybe he’s going there.

You would know.

I watch his footsteps press down with vigor against the asphalt of the path. No trace left in the black ground. No vestige of the fact that he had been there, under the streetlamp, just a moment ago. Our feet had hit the ground, just like that. At the same time as his, maybe even on the same day, years ago. After knowing each other for years, your slow gait had expanded into our slow gait. Nothing remained of it. No imprint, no marking left on the ground. Just a memory in the back of our minds.

Of course. I think of all this, I remember all these remembrances, recall all these recollections, reflect on these reflections, and I still do not know if you can do the same. I’m sure you don’t. I have no reason to be sure, but looking at the lamppost, one that illuminated years of our time together, I can’t help but get that feeling.

I don’t know who you’ll walk with next. This lamppost lights all, and yet remembers none. It won’t remember me, or the one before me, or the one after me. Will the light shine down on my Converse again? Or will it shine on the Nike symbol adorning shoes I’ve never dreamed of owning, walking in stride with your Vans. Maybe the pants next to your polka dot skirt will be joggers instead of khakis. The light won’t tell me. Even if it could, it still wouldn’t. Not that it matters.

The cold feels like nothing anymore. All I can feel is the past. I still remember the elation from getting a notification and seeing it your name on my phone. The words of your messages beaming through the clouds of a rainy day in my mind. The joy I felt seeing myself in one of your posts, seeing you next to me, popping off the background and into my arms, an angel alighting from its cloud, gracing me with its presence. Your touch alone sent my dreams into spirals of love. I remember the shark toy you got me for my birthday. I still squeeze it when things get rough, although it sits in my closet now instead of on my desk. I see ramen and I think of your face in the restaurants, unbothered with how you looked or sounded at that moment, fully enjoying every last possible particle of what was in your bowl. Just the memory of the sound of you laughing as you finished a bowl warms me up in this cold wind.

But the wind persists, and I’m sobered soon enough. All that I remember now is that it is over. I wasn’t the first you’d walked under that lamppost with, and I would certainly not be the last. I wish its light could irradiate secrets; it’s as though those were all you kept. All the love I’d shown. All the warmth I’d tried to reflect back. I finally figured out that light cannot be reflected, all I can do is absorb the radiance.

I look at this lamppost, and this bench, and I remember. Not all of it, but enough. The light doesn’t need to touch me, it burns my heart through my eyes all the same. 

What’s done is done, and all I can do now is hope. I can only hope than when you walk under this glow with another, you will remember the same things I do. I can only hope that when you sit down on this bench your heart will sink in the same way mine did. In a different way than mine still does. 

I can’t forget.

I hope you can’t too.

Lucas Molina - Junior English Major, just a guy who likes to write about stuff.