Sometimes it feels like we're moving; sometimes it feels like going nowhere. Seconds tick by and turn to minutes and hours and days; memories of the past slip away into nothingness, leaving you barren and raw. You try to hold onto the past and the memories of what you left behind in your life and find yourself unable to.
He was a teenager; I was a boy. He was older and wiser and braver than I; I was smaller and the world was new to me, so very new. He taught me what it meant to be alone; I taught him what it meant to be innocent. We would spend our summers laughing and lying in the grass and looking up at the sky, my father's voice in the distance beckoning us back inside, into rooms of stale oxygen and dark corners where spiders dwelled.
And then I was a teenager and he was a man. My days were filled with parchments and quills and Quidditch matches; his days were filled with the scent of my cousin's hair and the taste of her cherry lipgloss that she had started to wear from the time she was twelve. He lived in her laughter; I lived in sweat and dirt and rain and fatigue. I spent summers with my siblings; he spent summers with her, tangled beneath the sheets with her, limbs around limbs, bodies arching towards each other, breathing gasping, sweating, living in rooms where there were no dark corners where spiders dwelled.
They came to the house the summer after I graduated, his eyes alit with joy, her hair pale and bright in the sun (no dark corners for her) and smiled and laughed. She held his hand beneath the table and I talked to my uncle about Quidditch and what I was going to do now that school was over. (I thought of my room upstairs with the dark corners where the spiders dwelled.)
I excused myself after desert, slipped away outside, sat in the green grass, looked up at the dark sky. He followed; she stayed behind.
"You know what you're going to do kid?"
"Not yet."
He sat besides me, looks at the sky. "You'll figure it out, James. You're nearly as clever as your Dad."
Sometimes it feels like we're moving; sometimes it feels like we're going nowhere outside the dark corners where the spiders dwell.