I pick up my pencil and begin to write. It has been a long time since I’ve written something. Years, in fact. My life had just gotten so busy after college, so many things to do: fortunes to be made, friends to be betrayed, glass ceilings to be shattered, and all so little time to do it.

A friend dropped by my house to visit. We hadn’t talked in so long, I’d almost completely forgotten she existed. It’s funny how once vivid memories fade to such a uniform grey that they become overwhelmed by day-to-day trivialities.

She reminded me of a promise I’d made to her, a long time ago in the dog days of summer as we shared our first cigarette in a rusted-out car under the 5th Street overpass. I had promised not to leave her behind. To rescue her, as if life were a fairy-tale where I was a chivalrous knight and poverty an iron-scaled dragon.

A flicker of guilt in the bottom of my heart.

We went to dinner at my yacht club. It took only a minute to rekindle the spark of two people who had shared a childhood. She was just as smart and sweet and beautiful as I had remembered.

But the hurt in her eyes tore at the soul I had so long kept suppressed.

After dinner we went back to my place. The elevator ride up was awkward, to say the least.

Thirty-four stories seem like forever when you’re pondering lost time.

We shared a drink and reminisced on our by-gone youth, remembering all the moments too raunchy for dinner-table discussion: misadventures and mishaps, mistakes and misdeeds. We remembered the rusted-out car under the 5th Street overpass. How it had played such a central role in our childhood innocence and later in the loss of that innocence.

Her embrace was just as soft and warm as I remember it.

Now I leave her asleep in the next room. I try not to wake her. In the distance sirens wail.

As day breaks, I pick up my pencil and begin to write. It has been a long time since I’ve written something…