"You know, I think light is an allegory," I say to her. We are perched up on my rooftop, smoking stolen cigarettes from my father's top drawer. They sort of have a cottony taste to them, because my father tries to hide the fact that he still smokes but none of us buy it. They roll around at the bottom of his sock drawer, without their protective pack, and they pick up some of the excess lint from the wash. The dust we could brush off, but the taste was something different. Neither of us were old enough to buy cigarettes either, so we had to settle. She told me once that her goal was to never have to settle, but I suppose that goal is one to be achieved in the future and not in the present.
The sun is setting, blurred by the breaths of smoke exhaled. I read somewhere that you should try it at least once: sitting on top of a rooftop with someone you adore, smoking cigarettes and discussing the deeper parts of existence. The orange glow from the sky illuminates her face, glinting on her smile that wraps around her lipstick stained cigarette. After a long drag, she  leans back against the rough wood shingles and turns her head in my direction.
"Oh yeah?" Smirking, she pauses. The direct nature of her eye contact kills me, but I refuse to lose out on any moment she looks at me like that. "An allegory of what?"
        I lean back against the rooftop as well. Placing my arm under my head, I return her intense look. "Of whatever you make it out to be." She laughs and rolls her eyes at me, and I smile too. The sun continues to set and I focus my attentions on it, knowing that she is looking right at me instead of at the gorgeous sky. I think for a minute that even she is prettier than the sky, more lovely than the crinkle of the fallen leaves making their way down my dead end road to pile up by a gutter and crunch underfoot. For a moment, I lose sight of trying to impress her, forgetting the goal to seem as masculine as possible. I whisper, more to myself than to her, "nights like this make me want to write poems."
      "Nights like these are worthy of epics." She replies, chin turning toward the burning light instead of me. "What do you say we write one?"
       In that moment I was convinced that I loved her. We didn’t actually write anything formal, just spat out the craziest ideas that we could think of while the sun retreated from its theater. When it was dark outside and the moon cast its pale light on our skin, I asked her if she would want to stay the night with me. It wasn’t anything immoral or wrong, just one person falling asleep in another’s arms. Our hearts were heavy, but not with sadness. It had felt like the one day in summer where the tree on the end of the road bloomed, opening its flowers and showing the world hidden beauty. Something was revealed in those moments, and it were as if I had discovered a great secret that only I could know.
Just like the cigarettes, my father would never find out about her sleeping over. I dangled off the side of the roof for a moment- a slight risk for my usual clumsy self, and slipped quick and quiet into my bedroom window that was on the second floor. She followed, foot slipping brief on the sill of the window but catching its place just in time so that she slipped in just as easily as I did. My desk was placed right under the window, a strong wooden desk my father made for me, and we used it to stabilize us as we broke back into my house.
We slept that night with legs interlocking and arms twisted around each other. I found myself wishing the night would last for centuries. But just as the sun had left us that night, It reclaimed its place the next morning begging for our attention. It lapped at the edges of our vision and illuminated the messy hair and tangled bedsheets. We awoke, unwilling, and faced the sun’s heavy demands.

***

Nights like that happened often for a long time and I had come to expect them. Unlike my family, which consisted of myself and my father, her family was large; A mother, a father, an older brother and sister and a younger brother and sister. She was quite literally in the middle of her family, and her family was in the middle of her heart. Every saturday she would call her mother and tell her that she would be sleeping over a friends house and she would come to be with me.
Each week, we would sit on my rooftop replaying who-said-what at her house. She pitied me because of my lack of family, but I tell her that I only remember little things about my mother and my sister. How my mother used to sing to me, and how my sister used to tug on my shirt and ask me to play outside. I tell her that my father and I are alright without them. In moments like this, she takes my hand, smiles at me with glossy eyes and just nods, because she knows that she could never live like I do; family replaced by a small hole in the heart. She listens with sympathy, but without understanding.
In our town, there is a bridge over a forty foot wide river that flows in the direction of the school where we met. The water was fast moving, foaming at the edges and pulling along soggy leaves that were crunchy previous to their submersion.
The bridge has crookedy metal and rotting wood at the bases, and some of the older locals like to joke that the bridge is just as old as they are. The place had always been a place of happiness for me. Its slight sway was calm, and the place reminded me of my mother. It was the place in which I shared my first kiss with my love, and it was the place in which she inherited understanding.
On July 15th, 1974, Her baby brother fell off of that rickety bridge into the swirling water that we had always compared to Van Gogh’s starry night. The worst part of this was that the police had told us that it most likely was not a painless death. My love would never forgive herself for being in my arms that night, when her brother had sunken to the bottom of a rushing river. She could not forget that it was me that she was with that night, instead of him.
I watched her heart break in half. Not only was it her heart that broke, but I think that we broke too in the process. She would not allow herself to see me, and she wouldn’t let me know why.
She stopped coming on those saturdays where she would sleep over entangled in my sheets and with my limbs, the smell of smoke dancing and drifting around us in our drowsiness.
Just like her family was the center of her heart, I had come to discover that she was the center of mine. And while her heart was splintering, mine was as well. I couldn't help her. There was no was to dam the cascading sadness that she had to experience every day. I think this is how my father felt after mother and sister passed away, all those years ago.
When she didn’t come by one weekend, I decided that instead of lying on my own trying to comprehend the weight of her that was absent, I would take a walk to try and clear my head that was as clouded as a used cup of paint water.
There is a wrinkly, mean, crotchety old hag that lives up the street from me. She always has the most beautiful carnations in her yard. As I walked past her house, I picked one, not even checking to see if the woman would see me and yell at me for picking the prized jewels grown on her lawn. I just kept on walking, hardly registering when she did come out with a vein popping in her neck and a purple face, pumping her fist in my direction with her arm jiggling fast, which is always somehow incredibly amusing. It wasn’t today. I found that my feet took me straight to my love’s house.
You tend to notice small changes in appearance, even in places you hardly go. When we were seeing each other, we would always reside at my own always quieter house, with nobody to ask us what we were doing it or why we were doing it. When I arrived to her house that day, there were no lights on and no windows open. There were no shrieks of young children in the back yard, and no clinks of wine glasses that were audible from the street. Even the house radiated death.
I did not knock on the door. I did not knock at her window to get her to sneak out for me. I did none of these things. I recognized when there needed to be some respect. I left the perfect pink carnation on the sill of her window. I hoped that soon she would slide open the cool glass and find the perfect flower there, and she would think of me. I hoped that it would give her hope for the future, that maybe she would meet somebody someday- it doesn’t have to be me- and she will have a beautiful baby boy that resembled the child her brother was. Maybe she would see the flower and remember that there was a moment in which we picked one like it together. Maybe she will come find me. Perhaps she will look up to the sky and see that the sun still comes up for her every morning.
I left it there, lit a cigarette, and walked back to my own house.