In the dream we are barefoot in my childhood backyard. It’s sunset. It’s not a dream that riffs on memory. No, we’re adults now. I don’t know what words we are saying but they are gentle and sweet and forgiving. The grass is wet and soddened mud is slipping through my toes, glazing the tops of my feet. Something has changed within him. He radiates light, not venom. As if all the poison has been healed within him.

Something in the air feels like absolution: Even though we are anchored together in the dream, it is not by an inescapable gravity. It is by a choice that feels like the first springtime sun. In a haze I’m sitting down now, ignoring the mud. My back is to the neighbor’s tall wooden fence. My knees are spread, and he’s kneeling in the mud in front of me. He inches forward between my legs. He flows slowly towards me, his hands inching into mine. Then he leans in—as if to say I’ve wanted to do this since the moment I saw you—he caresses my face and he kisses me.

Parker is becoming the rain. Wednesday night—a school night—I’m 17, and I’m learning what it means to love an explosion. He stares at me, his jeans pressed to a breaking picnic table, leather jacket refracting the glittering rain.

“What if I told you I didn’t want to live?”

The question feels sinister: a threat, or a plea?

“I wouldn’t know what to say. I wouldn’t know how to live.”

He smiles at that. He stares up at the streetlights, the rain cascading onto his cheeks. Then he juts his chin back down.

He’s vacant.

“Who I am to you… I could never be this, not to anyone else. They wouldn’t let me live.” One single tear falls from his eye, to dance with the rain. He nods at at camera, protected underneath my jacket.

The photo would enshrine this: This person he could never be—that person did exist. That person could live.

I see the words in his glance:

Please make me real.

To take the photo would mean this secret self… this sensitive, emotive boy, free from violence…would forever live with me.

Unveiled. Seen. Permanent.

The tear falls to his chin.

I lift the camera to my eye, line up the shot.

Parker, real, true, mine, irrefutable.

I take the camera down.

All I can hear is the rustle of the wind, the chill of the winter enveloping me. He wipes another tear from his eyes, and leans his head to look at his feet. Dispirited. Shameful, even. He had always been my emblem of confidence, and now all I could see is the outline of his hair, his widow’s peak and gelled bangs blocking my view of his turned-away face.

Instinct: I close the space between us.

His head moves into my shoulder. The smell of skin and leather has a coldness as it rushed through my nose. I cannot see him. Only the rain defying time. Deliberate and slow, calculated and freeform, dancing in the streetlight.

I remember everything. I remember the the last night before college in the mountains when he stayed up all night carving me a bird in flight with his swiss army knife; he smashed the eighth or ninth beer against his forehead, threw it into the fire, and stared at me with the crackle of sparks flitting through the air across him. The crimson light in his eyes reflecting back at me, as he handed the wooden token to me he said:

Evan, for you, for all of the places you will go, and I hope you always remember the first time you felt you could fly.