You had to close the screen door fast so the moths couldn't get in.

A moment of hesitation had you pressed up against the wall as they swarmed inside, paper wings battering your bare cheeks. They would congregate around the ceiling lights, but those were too high for any earth-bound creature to reach. If the lights were off, they vanished, distant fluttering alerting you late at night that one of them was pushing toward the street lamps from your bedroom window.

Sometimes, if you stood and opened the creaking window, you would only be supplying the outside world with wind.

Time moved fast when you were old. Because it was the same, or because it was running out, take your pick, it doesn't matter in the end. At ten I was going to be a pilot. At twenty my legs were gone, thirty so were my dreams. I passed fifty and started counting backward, at thirty I started dying. At twenty I started dreaming again, in my dreams I was twenty for the first time. In my dreams I was flying, in my dreams I was goddamn standing and I was twenty. I was twenty the second time and dying.

They cried themselves to sleep, one night, mid-October, leaving swirling in tornado spirals at every entrance to the house. They had been young and they had looked love in the face and promised to make things work. No matter what, they said. Now they were two bottles deep in whiskey and loneliness, a phone shattered on the floor and a dent in the wall above it.

They thought they had been smart, promising monogamy or loyalty or love, something of the sort, but they forgot that such rivers run two ways. Tomorrow they would scream, but today they just cried.

Nonna taught him that the forest behind her old house was filled with fairies. He listened with the most attention a five-year-old could compile, and she spoke with the most simple words a grandparent could find after eighty years. The elves were his favorites. Nonna said they lived inside the trees; that was why it always felt like the forest was watching you.

When he was sixteen, Nonna was gone. Mamma told him she was with the fairies. He didn't believe her, but he went to the forest anyway. For old time's sake.

As he walked, he felt something watching.

Scientists might have discovered a fifth force of nature, but there has been a fifth for more millennia than we can comprehend. It is the drumbeats that make your chest thump and your heart swell. It is the voices, in every language that exists and a few that don't, creating melodies out of nothing and everything. It is waves of sound that turn into waves of bodies around the world, turning the sound into something tangible. It was synesthesia in the most common form, the ability to take sound, the force that drove us to create music, and create movement.

Only good things happened on gloomy beaches.

Hot days were for tourists, for people tanning like the sun wasn't just going to burn their skin into blisters. The nice days were for people who liked nice things.

The days with too many clouds and waves that were too big and seagulls that were more eager to feast on crab meat then french fries were the days for beach people.

Those were the days for sea glass that made horrible things beautiful, and old shells that made practical things beautiful. The surf crashed into them while they sunk into the sand.

Benjamin was too long a name for so young a person.

So he was Benny, when he was young enough that it seemed cute and not condescending. And then he was Ben, when caring about your parents was no longer the cool thing to do. And then he was BJ, when he needed a cooler name because he was with cooler people now.

He was Benjamin again when his mom screamed and held up a bag of cocaine. He stopped hiding things under his bed and didn't speak to her for a week.

He was Benny, still, when she cried.

His legs looked paper thin.

Really, they weren't much different than mine, because I was a thin kid, pale with veins glowing blue, a police siren that told the world I was alive. But where I was just taking root, he had grown big and beautiful until that was not enough and he began to shrivel. Old photographs are stunning because they show the before and after of things.

More than anything, I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to ask about being old and remind him of being young. I wanted to listen to a lifetime of memories.