It’s only April.

A few more nights and a few more mornings and then it’ll be May. Summer has barely come and Tao already can feel it threatening to split him open like a er-punch to the stomach, dealt when his back was turned, his mind preoccupied. There are unforgiving hints all around him, in the breeze slowly turning warm, the days slowly getting longer. He knows the days are still only 24 hours, just as they were in winter, but they feel longer, somehow. A few extra hours tacked on in the morning, a few more hours tacked on at night.

Maybe it’s just a reaction to the excitement he can feel in the people around him as they breathe a sigh of relief. Finally, the cold winter over and summer imminent. They greet each other in shops and in doctor’s offices and begin small talk with a praise for the mild weather and Tao longs for a return of winter. Selfish as it may be, there’s something to be said for not being the only one suffering.

With the exception of the song he plays on repeat in his car, he’s alone right now. He drives down a dark street and forgets his solitude from one second to the next, until he finds himself yanked back, his mental seatbelt repeatedly locking tight, jerking him into the here and now. But in those moments of forgetting, he relaxes in the illusion of companionship. Makes jokes aloud into the silence, hums quietly and ignores the empty passenger seat. It doesn’t need an acknowledgement. With his fingers tapping erratically on the steering wheel, he reasons:

He can get through May because what is May, really, but a continuation of April? June’s more difficult, bringing with it warmer weather and ice cream and reminders in everything he sees and eats and thinks. But there’s also a fork in the road near his house and if he turns left, he will eventually exit onto the highway. The fast, numbing, saving grace of a highway. He always has to come home eventually, but he knows that those long miles can carry him through the soft heat of June like they carried him through the bite of winter.

But July, with constellations, and windows rolled down, and music too loud, and that empty passenger seat and memories of laughing, and laughing, and oh, my god, seriously stop, I’m ing dying, and how did we get so lucky?

Tao steers his car into the parking lot of a playground, deserted save for the dark silhouettes of a few other parked cars, further down. The playground is part of a more expansive park, featuring walking paths and numerous gardens, all bearing faux-Zen names like “Healing Garden,” or “Enabling Garden.” But this is all from memory alone. The park which Tao now surveys through his windshield is pitch black, the treehouse lost to the darkness. The only indication of the playground in front of him is the occasional catch of moonlight on looming, dark plastic.

Through the darkness, he suddenly sees shifting figures, small and far away, intermixed with the occasional burst of neon light.

The Teenagers, his mind supplies him.

They’d always called this group of people “The Teenagers,” as a joke (“Those damn, hooligans,” Tao remembers whispering, though at the time, they were both teenagers, too. “Out here at all hours!”). The group changes in size from night to night, sometimes only a few people, sometimes a large, looming mass. Tao doubts that they’re actual teenagers, though they don’t seem particularly old either. Truthfully, he’s always viewed them with a sense of mystery and an almost fondness, the kind of fondness you feel for another person whom you recognize yourself in, someone who also comes to the park after hours to carve out a private little paradise in the dark. They remain ageless, faceless, and foreign to him, but implicitly unthreatening, always keeping their distance, their presence little more than the occasional murmur of voices carrying across the grass, accompanied by soft whirls of light. They bring holla hoops with them, not the kind that Tao’s familiar with, like the kind that he played with as a kid, but an elaborate kind, which light up in a dazzling array. They dance with them, all of these swinging, glowing circles rising up and around the park in a frenetic, mystifying mash-up of color.

Tao’s worked up a few explanations for these people over time: college students, circus people, some kind of new-aged exercise class. But they feel more personal than that to Tao, like these people aren’t people at all, but are instead a private kind of magic born in the dark night, another secret for just the two of them.

Now, Tao turns his car off, immediately silencing his music and killing his lights, leaving nothing but the soft tic of the vehicle cooling down. He watches the moving, glowing circles through his windshield. It calms him.

He can remember hot July nights, pressed up tight together on the playground’s kid slide, a wide and low expanse of red plastic, turned nearly burgundy in the dark. They lay on their backs, side by side, using it as a recliner to look up at the stars. Their arms stuck together, but neither of them bothered to move. There was a soft breeze, like heaven across the sweat on their skin.

“We’re so lucky if you think about it,” he said and Tao turned his head, studying his profile under the moon as he spoke. “Most people don’t get friendships like this, you know? Someone that they’re just so…compatible with. It’s amazing that we found each other.”

It was. Tao knew it at the time, just like he knows it now. His love wasn’t created in nostalgia.

He had turned his head and grinned at Tao and Tao had grinned back and they laughed, sweet and secret, because hot summer nights are the most potent kind of liquor. His hand slid down, fingers tangling in Tao’s just as a shout had risen up from their sides. They propped themselves up and stared over at The Teenagers whose laughter rose up in the night, rejoicing, tiny shapes high-fiving in celebration of something the boys on the slide knew nothing about. Whatever it is that made those distant people happy, Tao remembers an accompanying swell in his chest as though he was one of them, equally rejoicing. He had been happy for everyone on a night like that, when he had so much. When he was so lucky.

“Damn teenagers,” Kris whispered into Tao’s ear.

There it is. The mental jerk.

Tao lets his head fall forward to the steering wheel, resting his head on cool leather. Crying doesn’t even feel like crying anymore; he barely notices when it begins, or stops. He can make it through May and June. July just might kill him.

-//-

For someone inarguably absent, Kris is everywhere.

This entire damn town, which Tao can’t leave for reasons beyond his control and reasons well within his control, is stained with him. Tao’s taken to driving, more than ever before. Long, winding journeys through town and outside it, in search of the promise in the term “joy ride.” He feels the miles more, now, with only himself to pass them. Through time, he’s created safe routes, routes which lead him down streets with no memories, streets he never drove down with Kris in his passenger seat, his feet on the dashboard, singing off-key and asking if Tao felt like drive-thru ice-cream, as though the answer wasn’t obvious. But despite Tao’s best efforts, these new routes manage old ghosts, forged as they were in those months after Kris...wasn’t around anymore. Even in the bright morning sun, they taste like frantic, late-night desperation.

Tao can’t stop driving to the park at night. Or to the familiar gas-station he and Kris always frequented in search of midnight pick-me-ups, only ever just because. Their purchases are engrained in his mind. For him: Rice Krispy treats and sweet tea, for Kris: snack crackers and Mountain Dew, for both of them: a handful of $1 lottery tickets, impulsively purchased at the counter. They would huddle in the front seats of Tao’s car, the lights of the gas-station pouring in through the windshield as they passed a coin back and forth, scratching their cards one at a time, alternately cursing and squealing with their wins and losses. It was understood that any money won---a dollar here, five dollars there---would be spent on more lottery tickets, then handed over to the one who wasn’t as lucky to take another chance, because what’s the point if they aren’t winning or losing together?

It’s such small consolation, but Tao holds it close: If Kris were to text Tao right now, through some miraculous reworking of reality, and ask Tao to pick him up some food at the gas station, Tao would be able to fulfill the request with no hesitation.

It seems so simple sometimes that Tao actually checks his phone. It’s so close, his need is so big, that he becomes nearly delusional, can’t make sense of the fact that his phone continually flashes up only the ever-passing time and date, no new text messages from the simple, intimate, K. He used to keep track of how many days it had been since that last day, but there comes a point when it’s just been too