When the tide came in and the weekend sank into the distance, I was down a bike, down about a hundred bucks, and down the arm of a good friend. He graduated Sunday, and I was the first one to give that very arm a firm shake, and pass a sly grin from my face to his. He went home immediately, but I kept that dirty old town company for a few more hours before I stole Doug yet again and went for a long drive. I pulled into the village around ten thirty at night, roughly half an hour before he broke his arm raging to the metal of our youth. He screamed, and loudly, and we all knew it was serious. He was carried off to the hospital and the rest of us stood awkwardly around, his friends from home and friends from college instantly sliced into two clouds hovering on either side of a beer-stocked table in the middle of a field. We exchanged stories, as people tend to do, of an event that we had all just witnessed. The girls were the first to leave. Some of the guys from home headed out next. I was angry at them for leaving before they knew anything about the status of the graduate, but what could I say?

They went home, and I said nothing. His friends from military school soon drunkenly gravitated up to the house, and the field was left alone save for me and one other soul I had worried over for the past several months. Besides being barely able to stand at the moment, he was doing well, and I was glad. We swapped stories of women and parties and academics and plans for the future. Over the stalks of grass the first fireflies of summer were beginning to wink and spin. I had dreamed about them for several nights before this one. The truth was, I had been thinking about them on the whole drive down. I had been wondering when I would see them again, those drifting creatures that pull their weight in sunlight through blackness. That’s all I ever wanted to do, after all, and so seeing them on the night of my birthday as a kid was more inspiring than I could have ever grasped during those young years.

Now I know who they are, and I swear I won’t let anyone forget.

The graduate returned at two in the morning, and we gathered at his dinner table and drank coffee and laughed at the irony of life as his mother and sister yelled at one another over things with no substance. He was high on morphine or something stronger, and he mumbled and chuckled about every absurdity we could dredge up from this night and ones long gone. Several cups of coffee went into me and the time flew by. It was three in the morning, and I decided it was time to go. One of the graduate’s friends, the one who made enemies everywhere he went but they kept taking him places because he was an alcoholic with no family to speak of, the one who we brought to a nearby college only to have him viciously hitting on every girl in sight until he found one that would let him have his way in a back room, he became my unlikely traveling companion, and we hit the road with ambient bluegrass rumbling through Doug’s rusty speaker system. The world was dark and the rain was thick. We drove seventy the whole way, the night revealing the road only a few feet at a time.

It was five-thirty in the morning when we arrived. I dropped him off at his apartment complex and took the car to the lot. One last cigarette as I walked to the dorm from the far side of the campus. Then I stumbled into an uneasy unconscious while desperately trying to avoid the importance of everything.

Of course, it caught up to me in my dreams. Nothing I could do about that.

I woke up half an hour into my class and went to the rest of it. I don’t even remember it. I barely remember that entire Monday. I slept most of it. I had to force myself to eat, to shower, to smoke. I didn’t want any of it, and suddenly I saw through the veils and realized it was all just habit. Being impossibly tired can do that. But, to be fair, it can also cause hallucinations. Which it did.

Tuesday heaved itself into view with an apologetic sigh. I tried to tell the day it didn’t have to be ashamed for being what it was, but it wouldn’t even listen. It just turned away from me and walked off, with that walk girls do when they’re mad at you but they still need you to want them badly.

I didn’t give in this time. I could make my own damn Tuesday, and I did. I started driving again, east this time, and it felt like one continuous strand, all the days and nights, the miles of white lines. I drove until I forgot why, then I remembered and I kept driving. I stopped in Charlottesville to say hello to a friend there. I had thought he would have forgotten about me, but the son of a bitch even bought me a sandwich. We smoked warm tobacco on the balcony of his four-man apartment that he rented alone. We talked of the future. I spoke of Africa and novels, and he spoke of photography and snowboarding, and all was right for a while. We stood up and he walked me to Doug. We said our farewells, wished each other luck in the lives we had chosen, and I sped off.

I filled up the tank on the way out of town. Then Charlottesville was behind and the road ahead, and it was all okay with me. So I drove like a maniac until I needed to use a bathroom. Then I walked into a gas station and waited for the bathroom to be emptied of an old man who I witnessed stealing pepsi on the way out of the place. I kept driving, still like a maniac. I was pulled over outside a town that was literally named Wilderness for going eighty in a fifty-five. As he opened the door of his patrol car and walked up to my open window, I had just enough time to slip on my shoes. My friend from the field who could barely stand, he had told me that very night that driving barefoot was illegal. And god knows, despite being a very nice, very large black man, that policeman was on the look out for any secondary offense he could find. He had seen my speed, but luckily he had also noticed I was in control of my vehicle and wasn’t doing anything dangerous, and he let me off with a warning. I thought and knew I was screwed. But he cut me a break, and after twenty more miles I wasn’t shaking so much anymore. It was strange that these encounters still upset me so much. But this time jail was a possibility, so I felt justified in being so shaken.

Once my groove was recovered, I made Fredricksburg in not too long, and arrived at the house of the one I had come here for. She was alone in a large dark cave of a building, and then I got there, and neither of us were alone anymore. I pounded my thoughts into a laptop, then played a little guitar, and we sang together on the songs we both knew, and I almost felt at home. We fell asleep, and dreamed our separate dreams with the assurance that the morning would see us reunited, and that was enough.