nocturna

The thick summer air was cut and cooled by breezes, and a few phone calls later, three of us have cups of ice cream in hand and are walking down to the park as the sun sets. The skatepark is quiet, the water in the closed pool glistens but we're too old to think about sneaking in, so we stretch out on the benches of the new gazebo that feels like it's made of plastic and gaze out towards the small glitter of the skyline and the deep blue of the sky above us, listening to the crickets and the undulating water, sighing in bliss as the wind ripples through the leaves.

There's a few years of comfortable familiarity here, where we don't have to say much, and when we do, our incoherent thoughts are understood, all of us are tired and so completely relaxed that we probably sound stoned out of our minds as we ponder and ramble, voices in slow motion, disparate threads of conversation coming together about people who live in trees and people who throw mortars instead of shooting guns and he's got trip-hop playing on his phone and everything just fits together so perfectly that it's hard for us to get up and stretch to walk down to where the water is before the park closes and we walk back through the dark streets past shirtless men drinking in front of apartment buildings. I need more summer nights like these.