I can hear it, wind blowing, water lapping, some cavernous rock. The dusk was passing, the dim blue light of night creeping towards us from the horizon. Underfoot seaweed slid and squeaked. Looking down I watched my ankles part the surf as it rushed back to the waves before me- my hairy toes bright red like newborns drowning in the white chevrons of wake. I breathed in the darkening light.

“Aldo, oh - oh - oh…” there was a call out from a distance behind me.

My brother Johan stood expectantly near a jagged black stone jutting out from the sand. I imagined him smiling.

“Ohhhmm”

I hummed out a long low note, too quiet for him to hear, turning back to look at the black ocean ahead. Some bird shrieked and swooped towards the toiling water. I hummed my long sigh, letting the wind in my ears roar, the waves crash, and water rush over black stone. All the sounds at once, reaching out and holding steadily. Something, I thought. Holding something.

“Aldo!”

A gale of wind cut through the fleecy overcoat I wore. I swiveled and raised my right hand to wave. He waved with his left. I stepped onto the wet pebbly sand and walked towards him, leaving deep collapsed footprints trailing behind me. One day, one of us would be buried, leaving the other out here alone. I thought about it for almost the whole way to him. That is for some other time- feet planted in damp sand, wind tugging all around, a pair of smiling eyes shining in the waning dusk

“Aldo, oh oh oh!”

He laughed and leaned on the slick black stone, one hand on his hip. I hummed a long low note.

-

I was sitting in the passenger seat watching the fields go by in the night. Things are always blurrier in the dark, like the hard lines of existence begin to relax. No one is going to see us, they think, maybe just for the night, I can dissolve. All the nonliving things in the world are getting tired of holding their shapes. The tops of the trees rushed together, red and yellow in the brake lights of those going before us. Maybe it's just my eyes.

“There is nothing I remember about it”, Johan was chewing a square of old gum he had found in his glove box. The package was yellow, the bright blue letters seemed to be in Korean. A little icon of a cactus was on the side. Cactus Flavor. 

“Yeah?” 

“Really. I can’t think of a single thing that happened when I was 11” he smacked his lips as he chewed. He always does that. The car smelled like a cartoon cactus. I didn’t mind.

“You broke your arm-”

“Well, I remember that. I was also in the fifth grade, and probably got presents for Christmas and watched Tom and Jerry” He looked over at me as he spoke, “but those just are facts, you know? I just remember that those are things that happened and that I was there for them, but they’re not real memories.”

I nodded and reached down to itch my ankle beneath my sock. White cotton socks- they were dry but my feet still felt damp- the ocean doesn’t leave you easily. For a moment I feel that brainstem pulse, like the ocean is lifting me up again, carrying me out. Pulling on me at all sides. Like I am floating. Then, I remembered that I didn’t swim at the beach, just waded in to my ankles.

“Honestly, if I think about the actual memories I have of that year, it's just like-” he counted off on his right hand “the smell of Charlie’s house when he had that new dog, and like, the feeling of trying not to cry in math class, that huge lump in my throat” He made a sharp right turn and our bags shifted in the back seat.

“I get that.”

There was once a wildfire that burned down all the buildings to the west of our house. The sirens and death. I remember seeing huge flakes of ash cover the world white gray like it was an evil Christmas. I remember crying until I was sick when we saw the orange glow getting closer on the horizon. I remember everything making perfect sense then. 

“I think that there are some days that occupy as much space in my mind as years of my life do” I said, “I think more about single moments than I do about being eleven,”

Johan didn’t respond for a moment. Outside, a wispy fog began to settle onto the trees and the tops of houses.

“Yeah,” he was thinking of what to say. The hardest people to talk to are the ones you know the best. There are only a few things worth talking about, it seems, and often we would rather not talk about them for very long. We would like to believe that there is more to life than love, dreams, time and death, but it is when we talk to our closest few that we know there isn’t.  Sometimes I wonder what more there is we could ask for.

“I like that, though,” he was tapping his thumb on the wheel as the light was turning yellow, “it feels like it means something, that our memories aren’t just proportional. We don’t just collect data, we- we pick and choose and make ourselves out of it.” 

“Of what?”

“Out of time,” he cracked a smile like he had made a joke. I smiled too. We had been there before. Something like that. It’s not always clear what a smile means. Out of time.

“I think if memory just stacked up and up, exactly as it happened, you’d go crazy”, he said, “I think it's good that we have a few things that we choose to remember. Like we are the same person the whole way, going through time, like we’re traveling somewhere. ”

The mist in the headlights rushed past. The cool black night hovering above us like a perched crow watching the cars go by.  I understood what he was saying, but I wondered what my brother meant.

“Aren’t we?” I asked.

Johan looked at me, the dark outline of his silhouette blurring, the red light up ahead glinting in his eyes. For a moment I remembered being 11, and asking him whether ghosts were real and where our fish went.

“I don’t know,” he said. 

Somewhere I knew that he was thinking about ghosts too, but we were home. For the thousandth time we got out of the car and walked side by side into one place or another. I wondered if we were friends or if it mattered. The porch light turned on. 

“Mom’s probably still up,” I paused “How old are we?”

We both smiled at each other. I thought I might say something about the generational wealth gap. This sort of thing never occupied my mind for long. We were twenty, or close to it, then. 

“Big deal, we live with our mom!” he turned towards me as he reached into his pocket for his keys. “We’re building up a nest egg,” I remembered laughing at that. So I did. I remembered.

 I felt it. Like a deep hum at the back of my skull. A sinking wave deep inside, lifting and pulling me down. Out of time. 

“Aldo,” Johan was fiddling with the lock on the front door. “Next time, let's go swimming.” Then, he turned to me to smile, as if I were there. 

—-

I don’t know what a memory is. I don’t know what they are made of or where they go. I remember thinking that the past and future were strings pulling you in both directions. Little fishing lines that you can ignore if you squint or look at it from afar.  With a little distance they vanish altogether. Looking back you see the moments as they were; looking ahead you see them as they might be, each moment vibrant and pure. But you forget about the strings. And so we look at our present and wonder why it feels so stuck, so practical, so tense, not like it used to be or how it might be one day. Because there are strings on us, pulling us forward and back, making each moment hurt just a little bit.

I wonder what happens when a string is cut. When no future awaits you any longer. I wonder if the string on your back yanks you like a bungee cord, sending you flying all the way back to the beginning. A lifetime of memory collapsing in on itself. Each moment flailing free, a chain broken- no longer under any tension, waving in some imagined void. I remember wondering that. I remember.

I can hear it, wind blowing, water lapping, some cavernous rock. I hum a long low note.