Lying on the roof, gray shingles arranged in a dizzying array of porcupines latched onto my back, we breathed poetry. The words rose from our mouths, shimmering, to join the night stars. They spilled out, hesitant at first, but encouraged by the thrum of the cicadas, latched onto the sticky summer air. Thoughts, inhale: autumn or fireflies, rainbows or Christmas lights, apples or surfing. Memories, exhale: cheap sunglasses lit by the fluorescent panels of CVS aisles, intimate raindrops washing the chocolate milk mustache off my face. Head thrown back in abandon, singing and screaming across a field of green.

We breathed some more. Our fears crystallized, then were gently swept away; our questions dissolved into the wet beads framing our faces. Nonsense crept into our back and forth, rapid fire sentences, but wasn’t nonsense what started this poem in the first place? It had no head or tail, just a long sinewy body that weaved between each statement, each detail, each phrase, before decomposing in the humidity that surrounded us. Our snake-poem kept slithering away into the darkness before I could decipher its knots and undulations. I could barely follow it as it was, without taking note of what it was saying, and so I had to watch it unfurl its wings and drift away on the breeze, and let it go. By some unspoken agreement, we had acknowledged that our poem was this unstoppable and impermanent force that we could admire, even travel with, but couldn’t stop, and we waited, molded in the moment, seeing where it would take us and when it would fizzle out so that every word was bittersweet and once the poem’s last sigh crackled out of existence we couldn’t help but smile.

We did many other flavor filled things that night. Our poem had revitalized me, cleared out a space in my chest and pumped it to the brim with pressurized excitement, and as I scrambled through the bedroom window and back into the house, I felt the need to wildly laugh – to absolutely laugh my head off doing something only a 17 year old on summer break with adrenaline tangled in her hair would do. I ended up with chocolate cake smeared on my face in guise of a battle scar as I rocketed down a deserted Midland Ave on a too-small scooter under the harsh glares of 11 pm lampposts. It felt special and secret, as though the fragments of our poem had settled on my skin to shield me from the usual inhibitions of the night. Nothing could touch me; I navigated the gravel map easily, swerving around bumps and holes on the road with the cool and poise of a professional scooter rider. I was satiated. Amidst the crisp June air that blanketed me like an electric comforter, I felt more awake than usual.

And yet, when I recall that evening, although I smile at the thought of chocolate frosting mishaps and scooter races, our poem is the pang in my chest – a little snake curled around my ribs, pulsing with the rhythm of my exhales

May tiptoed by like a frightened hare, caught in the headlights of the spring. We wielded nervous laughter and shy smiles like they were a language. Tentative, hopeful.

Wild. That’s how June felt. The rush of picnics, headaches from the ACT, sudden honks from cars that shook us awake. Longing crept into my heart, carved itself a spot below my sternum. I saw sunflowers for the first time.

July, more muted than its cousin, surprised us in its glory, all white-tipped mountains, sparking cider, and we watched it from afar, as if in disbelief. Its Portuguese cliffs made me furious. Its shoe stores made you cry.

August brought heat, heavy torpor that settled on us like a skin, making us lazy, making us slow. Too distracted, busy pleasantly lying to ourselves, we didn’t spot the frustration rolling in. To hell with college, we agreed. To hell with friends, we said, and drifted quietly to sleep.

Where August slept, September screamed. A reckoning. The frustration cracked me open, and I spilled all my hot, hot anger onto you.

October stood for weariness. We tried to prop each other up, each offended by the other’s shaking, the lack of sleep etched into the other’s sighs. Our eyes lined with resignation, I fought with my sister, you wrestled with your mom. My world felt dull and faded, bland, without the usual October colors that I expected. Where were my fiery reds, the yellows I could melt in, oranges so crisp they smelled like rain? I shrivelled.

November was my jeans. They were Brandy Melville jeans, I think, mom cut, washed denim, pretty sleek. When they arrived, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Gorgeous! Gorgeous, gorgeous, pulled them on, zipped them up, nearly choked. Were they designed for a popsicle stick? I don’t know why I had hoped, and yet I wore them. Paired with chlorine, wet streaks, a plastic roof, they looked good on Thanksgiving day.

I cried and cried and cried. To hell with college? To hell with midterms, I told you. You reached for me and swallowed up my tears. I dove into your arms, nauseous as I hit water. The trees outside covered themselves in shiny frost with me, in true December solidarity.

January felt like a wave of bile rising from my stomach. I couldn’t stand to think of it, and though you knew, you didn’t feel it. The exhaustion started peeling back, culring off my eyes like layers of scratchy wallpaper. If December was a month to mourn, January planned, timidly, ahead.

Fuck February’s ibuprofen. I have never been so worried in my life. When I finally cracked, you handed me the glue to put myself together. Thank you.

March, I relearned how to tilt my chin up. Pondered the quiet gravitas of those who love, and salvaged the strangeness of those who do not give a shit. Every time I looked at you, I smiled, because your hair was overgrown and you looked stupid, spreading ACME monopoly tickets across your carpet, charting the course you wanted them to take. You still made me killer salads before class, and I still ate them to the point of sickness. We celebrated break.

I made you lemon bars in April. You loved their sweetness, their swirl of yellow. I started looking at apartments, first in Lisbon, then Prague, Madrid, Barcelona. We sent two emails together, and got chased off a park lawn by Montclair police.

Another May. I brought you churros, you threw me lemons, I delivered rollerblades and pulled you by the elbow as you screamed that you were going to die. I’ve worn your blanket as my armor (and your t-shirts, your scratchy sweatpants, the Champion sweatshirt that you got for Christmas). We still nervously laugh from six feet apart when your mom comes to check on us, Friday nights spent on your porch. I still smile when you ask to go biking. I feel more filled up, sunnier, than I did this time last year. You still look just as dumb, though. And I love you for it.

I call them shimmers. Ripples in the wind, they lurk in the corners of your eye, vanishing when you turn to look at them in earnest. They manifest in other ways. The pointed smile of a stranger at a train station, their lime green coat standing out from the sea of blacks and greys sprawled out in front you, hinting at some secret that the two of you shared, and that momentarily leave you feeling less alone. The gloss of morning dew on grass stems, full and plush. The soft dance of rainfall near your bedside during restless nights. Looking upwards, past the monochrome, baby blue sky, past the wispy clouds that frame that same baby blue sky, and spotting the faintest outline of the moon, hesitantly showing its face despite the daylight. Stepping out onto your porch after witnessing a thunderstorm from behind the shelter of a wndow and being greeted by the heady scent of the wet earth, bold and loud. Notcing how the laughs of children in public spaces seem to reverberate until they make sure to reach every passerby and greet them in varying echoes, and sighing at the thrill of standing in an empty street, bathed in the amber glow of lampposts only known to those who venture outside past midnight.

It seems to me that spirits – shimmers – appear to you to make you fall in love again. Not with a person, of course; that type of magic is reserved only for the living, the tangible, the real and firm that you can grasp in your hand and carefully dissect, peeling back the layers of their being until all that's left is the raw, pusling core of who they are. No, no. Shimmers are much more interesting than that. They are, without explanation. They do not exist, are not driven by what we would call purpose, destiny. They are not guides brought back from the afterlife, those who have broken through the curtaint that separates what is and what was to rescue souls in need. They have not been called to us by prayers, they are not ancestors watching over their loved ones. They do not serve God; they do not serve any god, any deity, for that matter. They are not evil, or malicious, but they are also not good. How could they be, with their endless drifting, their placid contentedness with being? They just are. To claim otherwise would be to judge the unknowable, to rationalize their mystery – a weak attempt to hide your own dscomfort at the thought of something greater than yourself. As murky as they are, shimmers have one clear, one indisputable effect: they make you fall in love, first with themselves, and then the world.

To the untrained eye, they are unnoticeable. At first. The sheen of a tulip, buttery with golden light cupped within its folds; a breath of fresh ar that lifts you up, sets you gliding, from the inside; a blueberry scone, begging to be eaten. Little marvels that slip into your life, slide under your feet, nestle into the corners of your closets. They tickle you, spark laughter in your eyes. Sometimes, they grow grand, grow tall, and start appearing in speeches, politcal movements, crowds of protestors caught in a singular breath that pushes them along. Sometimes they remain small. If they're small, no matter what you do, how hard you search for a greater purpose, a meaning to explain all this, you won't find them hidden in philosophy, in well-meaning but self-absorbed academics, or in their post-modernist cultural musings, declarations of faith and hope and humanity. Seek them out by leaving your windows slightly ajar, and maybe they'll find their way to you between the fingers of a wise sixteen year old, searching for a job. Maybe you'll see one reflected in the glint of a construction worker's hard hat, and maybe he'll find one perched above your wave to him as you go about your day.

The shimmers are not here to nurse you back to health. They are not your babysitters nor your therapists. They cannot cure illnesses and solve problems; you are better off consulting your local doctor if you're hoping for a cure. Shimmers appear, not in your moment of need, but whenever they feel like it. They are kind but harsh. They do not discriminate, against the good and the bad, the valued and the forgotten, the prosperous and the needy. They do not care for human niceties. They are not governed by karma. Either they are there, or they are not. Those fortunate enough to cross their paths should know better than to expect another visit. They simply are, and if you happen to witness their being, savor the moment. I'll let you in on a secret: sip the air once they've disappeared and you'll catch the remnants of their scent on your tongue, rapidly fading, something between rapture and cinnamon with the hint of sweat all in one.

Some become shimmer devotees, chasing their high, letting themselves become wholly addicted to it. Those that do – well, their days grow pale, fading in comparison to what they've experienced and what they've had to let go. Their thoughts are consummed with shimmer, shimmers, shimmering, and they shrink into shadows of their former selves, slits of darkness only kept alive and flickering by the promise of the shimmers' light. Others scorn the shimmers, reject them, sweep them aside and neatly label them as friviolous trifles, as if dismssing them is proof of their importance, sophistication, of their maturity as respectable, serious people. Most of us are stuck in a limbo, torn between the two extremes: fervently wishing to catch a glimpse of them once more, but resiisting the temptation of voicing this out loud, as if it's shameful, that we are not above this secret pleasure.

I can see that to you, my friend, they are something different. Kaleidescope one day, mirror the next, they bend light for you, showing you the folds and patterns of the world that you have never seen before. They have taken a liking to you, and you to them. Perhaps it has something to do with your sight. Blind, you have never once gazed at them possessively, wished them to be yours and yours alone, skimmed over them with disinterest frst, and regret later. You hold no expectations, and they like that. Your pull on them is steady, and they warp to mold around you, shimmering until you shine in tune with them.

I call them shimmers, but your world is shimmer, and so you call them home.

Lying on the roof, gray shingles arranged in a dizzying array of porcupines latched onto my back, we breathed poetry. The words rose from our mouths, shimmering, to join the night stars. They spilled out, hesitant at first, but encouraged by the thrum of the cicadas, latched onto the sticky summer air. Thoughts, inhale: autumn or fireflies, rainbows or Christmas lights, apples or surfing. Memories, exhale: cheap sunglasses lit by the fluorescent panels of CVS aisles, intimate raindrops washing the chocolate milk mustache off my face. Head thrown back in abandon, singing and screaming across a field of green.

We breathed some more. Our fears crystallized, then were gently swept away; our questions dissolved into the wet beads framing our faces. Nonsense crept into our back and forth, rapid fire sentences, but wasn’t nonsense what started this poem in the first place? It had no head or tail, just a long sinewy body that weaved between each statement, each detail, each phrase, before decomposing in the humidity that surrounded us. Our snake-poem kept slithering away into the darkness before I could decipher its knots and undulations. I could barely follow it as it was, without taking note of what it was saying, and so I had to watch it unfurl its wings and drift away on the breeze, and let it go. By some unspoken agreement, we had acknowledged that our poem was this unstoppable and impermanent force that we could admire, even travel with, but couldn’t stop, and we waited, molded in the moment, seeing where it would take us and when it would fizzle out so that every word was bittersweet and once the poem’s last sigh crackled out of existence we couldn’t help but smile.

We did many other flavor filled things that night. Our poem had revitalized me, cleared out a space in my chest and pumped it to the brim with pressurized excitement, and as I scrambled through the bedroom window and back into the house, I felt the need to wildly laugh – to absolutely laugh my head off doing something only a 17 year old on summer break with adrenaline tangled in her hair would do. I ended up with chocolate cake smeared on my face in guise of a battle scar as I rocketed down a deserted Midland Ave on a too-small scooter under the harsh glares of 11 pm lampposts. It felt special and secret, as though the fragments of our poem had settled on my skin to shield me from the usual inhibitions of the night. Nothing could touch me; I navigated the gravel map easily, swerving around bumps and holes on the road with the cool and poise of a professional scooter rider. I was satiated. Amidst the crisp June air that blanketed me like an electric comforter, I felt more awake than usual.

And yet, when I recall that evening, although I smile at the thought of chocolate frosting mishaps and scooter races, our poem is the pang in my chest – a little snake curled around my ribs, pulsing with the rhythm of my exhales.