Nightlights - February 11, 2011

 There was really bright light. So bright, that even in my memory I can’t make out the outline of whatever was making the glare. Thinking about it now, I remember being at my back porch and watching (squinting) at him as he made his way across the lawn. Him walking, unaffected by the brightness. Walking past the old playhouse of plastic slides and sandboxes. Past my mother’s geraniums. Walking so casually across the lawn, in the blinding, confusing, white light. I knew, as anyone would know, that it wasn’t a casual thing. But I didn’t know much more than that. It’s funny…it seemed as though my thoughts had been switched of. I wasn’t thinking anything, really, but I was seeing. Just seeing the light and the back of Gem’s head and his clothes. The glow didn’t grow or get brighter, it stayed constant. For the entirety of Gem’s trip across the lawn. About six and a half seconds of luminosity. 

    Six and a half seconds of absolutely no thoughts. No confusion. Just light and Gem’s familiar walk, him getting only slightly further away. 
    The last six and a half seconds I would ever see of Gem before he went wherever he went. The six and a half seconds that are an eternity in my head. 
    Because I never stop thinking about those six and a half seconds. 

    I don’t know when I first met him. I must have been a baby, because he has always been there. Even in the smallest of lost and buried memories. His face is there, warped and contoured, but familiar. 
    Gem had no parents. No house that I knew of, and if he did have one, I would never have seen it. Gem always showed up at my place. My school. He was always here and I was never there. No play dates. No parents. No babysitters. But always together, in some way. Whether it be the walkie-talkies that we spoke with at night or him showing up during my recesses at school where we’d venture out to the woods on the school grounds. He would teach me about trees and the sky. He would send me walkie-talkie messages that were quotes. Long words I never understood. 
    I remember a night where he had shown up outside my window to collect me. He had told me we were going to the woods. I had crawled out of the window, shaking, fearful, a timid boy afraid of being caught by his mother. Gem had assured me she was fast asleep, it was very late. 
    At age twelve, I was wiry and unfit. I can remember feeling tired and frustrated that Gem was always three paces ahead of me. Only now do I understand that this was because Gem had to lead the way. When he’d said “We’re going to the woods.”, I had assumed he meant the woods at my schoolyard. Where we always played in secret. We didn’t go there, though. We walked for thirty minutes to an unfamiliar place. A simple woodland that was the backyard of a very dark house. I looked toward the tall structure as we stepped deeper into it’s backyard. 
    “Is this where you live?” My question remains unanswered to this day. I don’t know who’s house it was, who’s woods we were in, I have not found my way back to those woods. We were there only once…and then never again. 
    The forest seemed to go on forever. I watched the back of Gem’s head intently and hoped he say that we were turning back. I was fighting off the urge to run away, but I knew that I could never physically turn my body in the opposite direction. I had to keep following.  
    Gem stopped when I realized the woods were barren. The deeper we got, the more bare the trees seemed. Until there was only leafless, brown, crooked branches and a navy sky above us. Gem stopped, and told me to look up. 
    “Where are we?” Of course, he didn’t say. He just pointed upwards and began to lower himself onto the bed of dead leaves and dirt. I watched him lie back and keep his finger pointing at the sky. 
    “Look at the moon.” he said. “What do you think it looks like when there is more than one?” 
    I joined him, lying down and feeling the dampness of the ground through my pyjamas. “More than one moon?” I asked.
    “If there were three…you think it’d be brighter?” He turned his head away from the sky and looked right into my eyes. 
    “I don’t know.” I said. 
    “They’re like night lights in the sky. So it’s never dark. So I can sleep.” he said. He kept on looking at me as if I was meant to ask him something. There was always a lot I wanted to ask Gem. Always a lot that I would never ask him. 
    His eyelids closed, he breathed in and out in a perfect rhythm. Asleep under the moon and twisted branches. Eventually I slept too. Dreamless. 
    In the morning, I awoke in my bed. 

    I was fourteen when he left. When the six and a half seconds occurred. It began with video games. He had been at my window to wake me up very early. Six in the morning, maybe. He told me he wanted to come inside and play with the game system. I remember licking my lips, sick with worry. He had never been inside my house. He hadn’t been near my mother. Did she even know about him?
    I told him to come in quietly…my stomach stirring. Worried that my mother would see him. I didn’t want him inside these walls, it didn’t seem like the right place.     
    We played. I remember the strange sort of look in his eyes as he held the controller, pressed the buttons curiously and slowly. He looked toward me several times as if he was on the verge of laughing.
    My mother never came into the room…I wondered if she was there. 
    As hard as I try, this morning is a memory that is never coherent. I can’t pinpoint where exactly he was sitting on the bed. I can’t even remember which game controller he used. I can’t place the time and the actions, the words, the looks. 
    Gem stopped after an hour. He set down the controller and walked to the window. I expected him to open it and jump back out, but he only leaned forward to look at the sun. When he turned back to me, he asked, “Which way to your backyard?”
    I entered the kitchen with caution, creeping toward the sliding door that lead out to back, but Mom wasn’t there. Gem followed me…(I would remember this as the only time he ever was ever in tow.) and crossed through the threshold of the sliding door. Where there was a beacon. Where there was no goodbye. Where there was six and a half seconds of nothing. 
    He walked away from me and into that light and this is all I know. I think it’s all I will ever know, and I don’t care very much what it means. What it means that no one seemed to react. That there were no news helicopters or investigations. It’s all a part of the questions I never had asked him. The ones I never will be able to ask. 
    Six and a half seconds isn’t so much time to lose. Even if I don’t know what it is I lost. 
    
    The nights that I sleep most peacefully are the ones where I can escape from my wife’s unconscious grip in our bed. I venture to the backyard and lie on the dampening ground, something like a sting of nostalgia in my stomach. I feel the glow of Earth’s lone moon on my face and sleep. Dreamless. Where it’s never dark. 
    
Fin

-Kortnee Tilson