４月２２日

I'm sitting at 15th Street and Prospect Park, facing the trees in the traffic circle and the movie theater with the sun in my face as it sets, sat on the steps of one of those two gorgeous pillars here washed in sunlight along with the stone, both of us gilded and brilliantly monochromatic from its touch. Teenagers play catch with a football somewhere behind me, as evidenced by the ball bouncing crazily on the asphalt when it slips through this end's guy's hands, jumps and shakes and hops and always improbably changes course just before it would lead him into the traffic heading around the circle. In my periphery the teenagers wander in and out of view with older brothers and never-made-good neighborhood friends, gabbing and jumping with both legs out over the belly-high steel posts set into the blacktop path, like they're leap-frogging them. People go by on bikes, other jog with headphones. Buses stop to unload passengers coming home from their workdays; no one new gets on. The air around me is damp but not too cool, and the corners of pathways and ponds' edges are ringed with fallen cherry blossoms: it is spring.

The football goes PUHNK as it hits the ground and I can see it slipping just over the teenager's outstretched fingertips in my mind's eye, brown hands with tan palms stretching towards it in the sky. A jerky, spinning hop takes it into my field of vision and a cry goes up from the teens behind me--some several more in number than I'd thought, judging by the voices I can hear chiming into the sudden shout. The ball hops one way and then jumps improbably high, hitting the other column across from mine, where a different group of teens is holding court on the shallow steps, stoop-style. The ball thwacks the stone above their heads and all contract their frames, pulling hands over heads and heads, turtle-like, towards collars. A girl standing amongst them doesn't even seem to reach out to catch it, but suddenly she is cradling it in a bough of spread fingers, as easily as if she had been holding it the whole time. There's no tension, no weird issues of honor like many a stranger might suppose about strangers and inopportunely bounced balls. Fists are bumped, first greetings exchanged, and some of the stoop teens leave their perches to join the catch.

More 30-somethings job by. Other 30-somethings walk toddlers by or wheel strollers. A boy in bright blond curls and of not more than two bobbles by, his mother pacific, indulgent and decisively pregnant. I can't hear him, but I see the expression on his face, and I hear her confirm: it's a football. Those boys are playing football. I think I have the same urge to play with them that he does. Something causes a big laugh and a commotion from them, but they're out of sight behind the pillar I'm leaning against. Fancy bikes whizz by with spandex-clad alien-looking riders. My bike is here by my side, root beer brown on the side I can see, and gold like me on the side the sun can see. As for the sun, it has been sinking lower this whole time, and I can see shadows on my notebook and from my hands that a few moments ago weren't there. It's still above the buildings on 15th street, and has grown temperate enough by this time of day, just moments away from setting, temperate enough to let you look right at it for just a split-second. You can stare right at it. Less than a heartbeat, but it's long enough to see the perfect, shockingly perfect, circle it makes in the sky. How can anything have such a perfect shape? And then Robin is here to meet me, and I am looking at her shoes past the edge of my notebook.