The First Vision

I had a vision of us, in the future, reincarnated as undereducated, less-than-squeaky-clean teenagers in the garage of your old Southern small-town house in the sweltering heat of summertime. The town is a measly ten thousand in population, and the countryside is little more than a swampy wilderness, a messy tangle of old deciduous trees that are wallowing in their own waste of dead leaves, layered from years of decay. In the past of this future, as a child I would play in the semi-wooded hills surrounding an old dirt road near my house, and come home every evening, dirty with nature. There was an old patch of blackberry bushes there, and I would pick the overripe berries, dust off the layer of nature's dust and gorge myself on the sweet raw fruit. During summers, my hands were forever sticky and stained, my body covered with mosquito bites, and my hands speckled with tiny scratches from the innocent-looking thorns of the blackberry bushes.

I would return home a mess, my mother fussing over my recent misadventures, insisting on my immediate sanitization, even though I’m sure she knew as well as I did that I’d be out the door and filthy again in five minutes, the soap sighing exasperated in the soap dish. The Dirty South is aptly named. Until you have known the sweltering heat of a Southern summer, I don’t expect you to really understand what it’s like to experience a kind of heat so thick that it seeps into your body, absorbing your entire being. I remember wondering about it, even as a young child. One afternoon, the feeling of the hot summer air was pressing against me, smothering and suffocating as I played in a little sandbox in my backyard. My unwashed, dirty blonde hair was falling into my eyes as I shoveled and sifted the rough grains of white sand through my fingers, so unlike the clumpy crumbly soil from which the old forest had sprung. I couldn’t understand how it could be so hot, so late in the day, (eight-year olds have no sense of climatology) and with that, I headed towards the woods and wandered back to those old wild blackberry bushes, branches heavy with fruit…

They're still there, those bushes, to this day, though contrarily, they have not thrived in the wild liberty of nature as most plants do, but have actually receded. Sometimes I think back to that time and wonder why that is, but it does not matter; I no longer visit the wilds of the country anymore. Instead, I prefer to take walks down the dirt road, sometimes with a friend or riding on an old rusty bicycle dating from my father's boyhood. My summer afternoons are now spent chewing lemonade-flavored bubblegum on your porch, while you smoke cigarettes and play an old beat up acoustic guitar. The evening is infested with insects, and the air is humid and dense, closing in upon you the way water does when you are submerged in it. We're dirty, though not nearly as much so as when I was a child in the sandbox, exploring the woods and eating blackberries. Our hands are brown and our skin salty and smooth with dried sweat. Even as we age, and become conscious of our own hygiene and orientation in the world, the Dirty South permeates through everything, seeping into your skin through the air itself.

This particular afternoon is particularly stifling. It is not quite evening. The sun is just barely peeking over the horizon the way a child peeks over the backseat inside of a car, bidding goodbye. The brilliant golds and russets of the setting sun have passed, though a few warm rays still remain, receding ever so slowly with the oncoming twilight. My body feels loose, the way one feels after a day of great physical activity followed by a good rest. We're in your garage, and I'm leaning on the side of the family '66 Chevy that's covered with a speckled patina of rust that only you and I seem to find attractive.

The walls are lined with shelves of junk—old car parts whose names I couldn’t even begin to fathom, covered in a sticky layer of ancient oil mixed with the softly gathering layers of several decades of dust. Your dad's an auto mechanic, and despite your budding musical talent, you will be too, inevitably. You're sitting on the garage floor with a wrench, your hands smudged with oil, as you tinker with a motorbike. I watch and listen to your anecdotes and laugh and hand you tools as you need them. We talk about elementary school and try to remember the names of all of the kids in our old classes and wonder what their personalities are like now, basing our guesses off of vague impressions of memories. Every time we discover a memory that we both share, our eyes light up and we talk rapidly and exuberantly about the experience, trying to piece together the details as we laugh together.

That's when you look up at me, kneeling on the ground. Most of those last rays of sunlight are filtered through ancient oaks, but from my vantage point, the sun shines directly behind you, illuminating your silhouette and bathing us in the glow. You say, "I always thought you had green eyes then, but they're really more of a gray-ish color." I smile and there is a brief silence between us as the last rays of the sun fade away. Your wrench clinks lightly against the oily metal and the sound rings out clearly into the evening. The sun finally goes down, and the blue evening settles in. The air becomes cooler, though only marginally so. I turn on the faintly yellowed white fluorescent lights in the garage, the junk on the walls casting crisp shadows. We speak very little in the following few minutes, as you tinker away, and I look down at my feet and study my old dirty sneakers.