The Street You Grew Up On

Imagine a street, but not the one you grew up on.

And not the one you barely remember, dressed in raindrops and drunk on beer with midnight breathing on your neck. The street where the friend of a friend lived. When you wondered as you left and the lights glittered in the one big window if they were happy. If they’d still be there in a year. If you’d become friends.

They were. They weren’t. You didn’t.

No, please, imagine a street you’ve never seen. There may be houses so close they could hold hands. Hip to hip so that a conversation whispered from one open window slips over a withered walkway, a leaking garden hose, a stained gutter, into a crack where the wood is pulling apart.

Don’t imagine the street where you skinned your fresh knees and frowned at waterlogged worms on the sidewalk.

Imagine a street with only one house, abandoned like a blind cat. Of course the grass around it is long and tired. The glass clouded and wary. The inside a delicate mystery. Would you try the door? Look through the milky lenses: A gate, a field, a scree, a sky. A world before life tangled up its own limbs.

Not that one either. How about another street that you didn’t grow up on. One along which there are no houses, not yet. Only strings and stakes, piles of dirt. Indecipherable scribbles on a resentful landscape. In time the houses will rise, like termite mounds, like Lazarus. Wood, stone, wire and nails, given life they didn’t ask for.

Don’t imagine a street.

Don’t think about the house that held your body when it was small, and your dreams were fireflies on a distant hill, waiting for cupped palms.

You have grown into the world.

You haven’t seen a firefly in years and midnight holds its hands to your throat.

Don’t imagine the street where you grew up.

Everyone moved. Or everyone died. You can’t remember if there’s a difference.

Don’t put pen to a disintegrating page.

You might raise the dead.