In the time it took to fall from a tree, I might have found the meaning of life.
   Funny that by the time I hit the ground I’d lost it.
   The plan had been flawless: a simple leap from window, grab tree, swing from tree in glorious arch, land maneuver. And yet, some trees, it would seem, are not up to the task. And some trees seem intent to fall with you. That, in part, is how I ended up laying in my grass staring up at the stars with a large cherry tree branch on top of my chest. The silence was profound. Or at least it had the potential to be if not for the ringing in my ear, the waiting in my chest. My fingers reached through the darkness for meaning, glanced it, slipped away when grass crunched and a figure laid down beside me.
   A tilt of my head. “You, strange neighbor boy.”
   He ever so casually strokes the top of the potted Bonsai tree resting on his stomach.
   “Why?” I demand.
   “I saw you laying out here with a plant atop your chest.” He lets his head fall to the side to face me. “It looked symbolic enough so I thought I’d give it a try. Smaller scale.”
   We look to the Bonsai tree. It slumbers peacefully in an angular pot printed with a heinous moon and sun pattern. His eyes stay on the tree; mine go to his face.
   “Why?” I repeat.
   He understands. “Lonely nights breathe loud minds.”
   “Hmm.” I look to the stars, pinpricks of light rolling out into oblivion like a carpet down an infinite set of stairs. “I will be fleeing to New York, you know.”
   “Fleeing from what?”
   I tilt my head, allow eyes to know eyes. In mine he finds resolve.
   “We are in Florida,” he says, slowly, carefully, almost as if he fears I will hit him for saying so.
   There is a defeated looking palm tree at the end of our street that we look to for evidence.
   “Maybe,” I allow.
   Our eyes divulge on a dark road and he looks to his house, to the counters that glint like teeth; to the frost on the glass, heat outside of it; to the pair of high-heeled shoes sitting neatly beside the gleaming black dress shoes. An upstairs window glows. His, maybe. A sock is tacked to the wall like high-chinned rebellion; an underwear flag duck-taped to a twig flutters outside his opened window.
   “I think,” he says, slowly. “I will flee as well.” He cracks his knuckles, once, then all at once, stands fluidly, and offers me a hand. “Let’s chase the stars, Cherry Tree Girl.”
   From the cherry tree I crack off a long branch. Then I take his hand.
   Together, him with his potted plant beneath his arm, me with my cherry-tree walking stick, Bonsai Boy and Cherry Tree Girl wander down an empty street. Our shadows are bigger than we are, monstrous and wonderful creatures that crawl inky imprints over our slumbering neighborhood as we make our escape.

   We find a train that moves like a little old man down curved stairs. It’s crooked and ugly; it’s old and inept. Side by side we stand in front of it, close enough for rusted metal to brush in front of our noses.
   Do we dare, do we dare at all?
   We do.
   It is a simultaneous climb into the train, a simultaneous scuttle to our respective sides of the boxcar, and an automatic reach to secure our plants. Our boxcar is empty if not for the pressing weight of purposelessness. Neighbor Boy spreads his legs out before him, Bonsai tree on his knees, just as I do the same. The soles of our feet just barely touch. We are imperfect reflections of each other, maybe.
   His face is blue as he leans it back, as if to sleep, as if to dare to dream. What is he thinking of? Lonely nights breathe quiet minds.
   Maybe it is the rush of the train, the lace veil of confessional darkness, the not-knowing that lets me say it. “My best friend is dead.”
   Neighborboy turns to me in slow motion, in strobe lights, in a year long slide of his eyes from nowhere to life. There is a frown on his face, a delicate thing. “I’m a little dead on the inside, I think.”
   Words are gunpowder, igniting.
   “We all are.” Quickly, a knee jerk reaction.
   Neighborboy, resigned, eyes sliding back. “Maybe.”

   The Florida state line comes; the Florida state line goes. A breath leaves Neighborboy’s chest. Lines leave his face that I didn’t remember being there in the first place. He mumbles softly, sleep walker talk. My mind is a live wire, flicking around a puddle-spattered street.
   “Forgive me, Neighborboy, for I have sinned,” I say, the words tangled.
   Pause.
   Neighborboy considers as some fingers clench and unclench while the others stayed closed. “Okay.”
   As if I had been waiting for his acceptance at all. He is a filler. A body with ears that might hear this confession. I clutch my branch for strength.
   “She is dead. We were best friends, once. We’d jump off the swings together, you know. Every day, then the last days of school and the first days. It had some symbolic meaning, maybe, but mostly we liked the noise. Squeak of chains. Crunch of gravel. Voices from around the corner. Smack of air. We’d talk about the year, about ourselves, about each other. It was a ritual. Sacred.”
   Sacred, maybe, like the names we give each other when it’s too dark to see each other’s faces.
   “Last year she was not there.”
   I say it with a pause, waiting for the dramatic reaction. There is none. It seems like nothing. It was everything.
   “She said that we’d ‘drifted.’ Drifted, Neighborboy, as if we were little ships set in an ocean bound by winds together by chance for a bit before innocently meandering apart. I am not, a ship. Humans cannot be ships. Humans can be humans and humans can be monsters, but humans cannot be ships.
   Monsters, because it is a monstrous thing to ignore. Because it is an act of evil, that little moment, that shift of weight away, that pause in conversation as you realize no one wants to talk to you. To be uncertain is to hate your self. It is the need to rip your skin off with your own hands. That is what she did to me every morning I walked into school and realized I no longer knew who I could talk to. I went back to swings once and it was quiet. Silent was so very violent, Neighborboy. I can remember, above all else, the smell of lemon. I’d hide in a closet, sometimes. To fill the time. Time can be so slow, sometimes.”
   She called me one night, drunk off her mind. So drunk she’d forgotten she hated me, forgotten that she’d made us into g------ ships.” A suck of air as I try to imitate her. “‘Come get me,’ she’d whined. ‘I don’t want to drive,’ she’d said. Like that would make me forget. Like I would drop to my knees for anything she needed. I wouldn’t. And so I told her, ‘Sorry, but we’ve drifted too far.’ I can remember the sarcasm, the thrill of my blood, the victory, the slam of the phone back into the receiver. How quickly I fell back to sleep. How abruptly my mother woke me the next day, how her eyes were racooned with makeup, rimmed black and red. And that her hands trembled, but not as badly as her voice. And I had known, before she’d even told me, felt it like all the blood leaving me at once.
   Forgive me, Neighborboy, for I have sinned. I was told that I shall not murder, and yet look at her blood on my hands, Neighborboy, look at it!” Hysteria in my voice, in the quake of my hands, ruby red in the blue moonlight.
   He watches them dispassionately, flat-eyed. “Then wash it off.”
   “Then wash it off,” I echo.

   Another state line crunches beneath the ancient train’s wheels and Neighborboy grows bold, Neighborboy leans vertically out of the boxcar, lets his hands drag on the gravel, hit against branches. He grows so bold, reaches so firmly for his mortality that he makes God laugh, crinkle-eyed. Until the train hits a rock and jars and jolts. Neighborboy finds himself a puppet without strings, suspended in the air, and something grows wild in his eyes as something grows panicked in my chest. It is so real, suddenly, the possibility for fragile things inside of us to stop working all together. I reach for his ankle, for him. He fumbles through nothing. His arm pinwheels, lurching off the ground, weighted by the bonsai tree he still clutches. The plant slams into the boxcar’s wall dully. This is stability.
   Neighborboy straightens back up quickly, gasping, spitting words like a patient coming back from three minutes of legal death to pronounce he saw a light.
   “Run, d-----, don’t ever stop.”
   The expectation crumples in on itself.
   “What?” I say, angry like he’s taken something from me.
   He laughs, almost. Instead, his smile cracks, a brittle thing.
   “My family was built on a shelf, one after the other on a spinning block to be carved and placed one hand on one shoulder, one hand on one hip, one smile on one lip, perfection. I wasn’t built; I just occurred, I guess. If you aren’t built, you build yourself. Or you let someone else build you.” Neighborboy, like a man kneeling in the guillotine, looking at the blade. He licks his lips, considering. “My father was a good man, he was iron and he was suits and he was certain. Is, I mean, of course, he is. And he was certain of who I would become. If only I had been what he thought I was.”
   A pause, like the set of a curtain to allow time to think.
   “Every day is war, you know. And words can be little things that lie in the street that you drive over thirty times before the thirty-first. When they explode around you. Headlines, I mean. Boy Wonder Leads Team to State Semi-Finals. My favorite one:  When You Reach the Top, Where is There Left to Go? And Can an Arm This Good be Legal? It wasn’t. You see, I thought I was just that: a wonder. I wasn’t. I was orange juice.” A laugh, short, stunted, unnatural. “Orange juice. He was poisoning me, you know. Not too much. Just a bit every day. Just enough to ‘keep me going,’ he said. I demanded he admit it; the knowing made it harder. Like I was lying every day that I threw the ball. I’d think about it sometimes, at all the wrong times that is, and hesitate. A true liar will always tell the truth in admitting he is a liar. This is what I’d think of, try to make sense of. It didn’t go too great. The third day I came home with bruises as big as my face was the day my father gave me his favorite present yet: a syringe.”
   His fingers open one at a time, a skeleton’s rib cage opening rib by rib until that something inside finds the night, until I can see what he’s been holding on to so tightly all night. A syringe. Thin needle, deep plunger. He stares at it in love; he stares at it in hate.
Uncomfortable, I look away. His bonsai tree looks up at him, head-tilted, waiting. Neighborboy avoids its gaze. I avoid Neighborboy’s. Focus instead on threading together threads to make a moment. Of calm. Neighborboy’s face across from me is distracting, is clenched-jawed and fire-eyed. His story is not over, this we both know.
   “It made me.” Pause, consideration. Begrudgingly: “Faster, smarter, stronger-“ His lips fold into a line as his luminescent eyes meet the gaze of the bonsai tree. “Perfect.”
   His hand clenches around the syringe involuntarily, maybe, and a drop of blood winks at the night, slides over the surface of his palm, skating the surface. Neighborboy stares at his blood like it’s something he doesn’t understand.
   “It tasted like bliss and it felt like h--- but I’d heard that if you’re going through h--- keep going so I did and I did but once you’ve gone far enough it’s awfully hard to find your way back out. Reality and Fantasy, sometimes they tangle, you know. I’m losing my grip –“
   But his hand on the syringe had seemed so strong?
   “A little bit more every day. I confronted my father once, you know. Told him what it was doing, how I felt. You know what he said?” Eyes on me now, inviting me under the lace veil.
   His eyes are an answer.
   “Run, d-----, don’t ever stop,” I say.
   He nods, sighs, cries a little.
   “Run, d-----, don’t ever stop,” he agrees.
   I understand for a second how we came to be. That he was lonely. That I was lonely. That our minds were loud. And somehow we have found a way to be alone together.

   It is an understanding more so than a knowing that this train will not go to New York. And we nod heads because we agree that we do not need to see lights burning against the night to know that we do, at least a little more than we used to, that there is something inside us that emanates, that will not be extinguished. And that we need the bottomless sky.
   Neighborboy leads the climb, he leads it when he stands with cracking knees and a back that stretches like a cat. I follow with steps that aren’t uncertain, I follow him up the ladder.
   I, I forget to be uncertain. I, I decide that solitude is a choice.
   He, he wakes from his dream walker’s daze. He, he feels that a moment need be no moment but this moment.
   On our knees, side by side, the train roars. The wind is so loud we cannot hear the whisper of existence. But maybe that’s the point: certainly the point of existence is to never find meaning, to never even look for it because in looking you could miss a moment. This moment. The train roars and we look at each other.
   And we know.
   We stand, knees certain.
   The beauty that wraps itself around us is impossible. It is the sun that rises just as we raise our arms. It is our voices, joyous, thunderstruck. It is this day, invincible, beginning at our command; it is sunshine shooting from long arms over the rolling ocean, and the wind against my cheeks and feeling mortality and how it is irrelevant. It is salt in the air and euphoria and beauty that makes us beautiful too, more beautiful than we have ever been before, more beautiful than we will ever be again. It is the knowing that this is the greater we’ve been waiting for. That this is the thing greater than life.
   And together, Bonsai Boy and Cherry Tree Girl hold their plants up in the air and shout for no reason at all.