Amigos del Barrio (Neighborhood Friends)

When I was younger my friends and I would play in a manner that could be defined as ceremonious, in the unique relationships we formed outside of school and inside a naïve world, and unprestigious, in the way we could spend a whole day doing nothing but everything that is expected of kids that soon would be faced with the task of adulthood.  We liked to think we owned the neighborhood, in the way that we hid behind the scenes, the shadows, and the habituals of a land that we saw as magic through our perspectives of childhood.  When the people that lived at the corner house, in front of the alley that held our sacred space of a rusting basketball net without a net, a wide space of majestic concrete floors lined by garbage bins, black for trash and green for recycling, moved out last year, a hole in my heart formed, as I knew a part of me had disappeared.  Growing up the kids that lived there, as well as others scattered throughout the confines of the square of more or less a mile, were my compatriots, my partners in crime.  They remain in the back of my mind as archetypes of summer afternoons, snow days, and spring nights bike riding throughout the neighborhood with nothing to do but kill time and bask under a sky that held us in our youth.

Yesterday I walked past the alley in back of the neighbor’s house of the neighbors that had just moved out.  I could feel the emptiness of the inside without knowing that no one was in it.  I felt a sense of solitude and danger in the way that I knew that the house where I spent at least a hundred summer days was now without me.  A car drove past as I walked under the basketball rim.  The garage door was plastered with graffiti, the ground covered in glass and small stones.  I suddenly felt the need to find myself, the self that I used to know as complete, only because I had people that I could truly call friends, that I knew I could forever think of as a part of me.  I found the spot in between two garage doors, where I remember we would form a mountain of snow to slide down on sleds on snow days.  A soda can lie there, and I kicked it under the fence.  Walking to Theresa’s house after arriving home from college for spring break had never felt so momentous, so exhilarating.  Being twenty years old felt like I had lived at least five lifetimes.