Stretched Canvas
The sun dripped down on the lake and onto us. I was eleven and she was fifteen. Our shoes and socks were piled behind us and we were cooling our feet in the mossy water. They looked like fish, goldened by the sun’s dance on the water’s surface. I watched her and she watched the horizon. Crickets began their songs and we sat and listened as they became ghosts in the wind.
‘I’d like,’ she said softly to the sunset and to me. ‘To live my life in a montage.’
She lay back on the slope, looking up at where our houses sat next to each other. They were the first on the street. We always talked about how they were on the trail together, pioneers and adventurers. We loved those little houses.
Circumstances and accidents in great stirs had given us that lake and each other. Necessity had been our bond. The world was brought down low to a doll’s house and the toy box was empty apart from us. Five years felt like a lifetime for a boy like me but to her, they were a blink of a pale green eye.
I asked her what a montage was as I leaned back next to her. I looked at her and she looked at the sky. The water ran about my ankle like a band or tight sock. It was colder than the air.
‘It’s when you see a lot of time at once in a movie. Like in Rocky.’
I felt at the movie tickets in my pocket. The screen had her even then. She had a camera. It was a small thing. She never let anyone else use it; not even me.
Her hair sprawled on the grass and fell about her overalls like auburn flower petals. The back of my hand rested in its cool waves and I couldn’t feel the grass beneath me.
‘I just think,’ her hands rose in little curls and puffs when she spoke. ‘That it would be so beautiful to only live the important parts. So melancholic.’
I said I thought it would be lonely and she looked at me and smiled and told me I’d understand once I’d grown up a bit. She hummed a vintage country love song. I tried not to listen. Romantic music always puts me in the mood to say what I shouldn’t and wake sleeping dogs. I turned away to look at the trees in the distance. I wriggled my toes just to feel the water squish between them.
She said it wouldn’t be lonely because she’d still feel those relationships and memories that she’d missed but she just wouldn’t have to wait for them to show up. I wasn’t sure I understood any of that. I’m still not.
I started to kick my feet in the water, making a little tempest and commotion. I tried to catapult with my kicks, getting the water back on us. She touched my arm gently and I knew to stop.
‘Would I be in it, then?’
‘At the start at least,’ she looked at the darkening world.
Some people have a way of seeing everything worth seeing in a single moment and she was one of them. All the world would open before her and she would soar through the clouds like a bird in a flock with the others of her kind, visiting all the beauties that the heights and depths of life had to offer. They would fly to princes and princesses and sing to them about the stars they played among and the canyons they raced through as children. They land in palaces. They land on oceans and in trees. They land by lakes where little boys rest against them and feel their hair and feel for a while like life is all wonder and love and horizons.
They never rest.
‘What would I be doing?’
She thought, lost in the clouds, in the Sun’s stretched canvas. She turned to me, her hair collecting dead brown leaves like fish.
‘Being my best friend.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Sure. My rock in every storm. I’ll cry and you’ll be there for me. I’ll sing and you’ll learn piano. Best friends. Then, when you’re married and have children and all I have is a tortured artist’s soul, we’ll see each other one last time. This place will be built up then and I’ll see you down some street and you’ll see me. We’ll both know I can’t stay. You’ll nod to me and I’ll nod back. Then I’ll be gone, down some alley.
‘You might catch glimpses of me in the news or listen to me on the radio. Maybe even see my movies.
‘Then, when the montage is over, we’ll cut back to here where you’ll take your grandchildren down to this lake and listen to my old records and you’ll tell them about a girl you once knew.’
I asked how she knew it’d be like that and she said it was the most bittersweet thing she could think of and that life had to be like that and I’d understand when I was older.
The sun left us and we dragged our feet from the water. Her voice became distant then and I lost her face in the darkness.
‘I’ll move far away and be a singer. London. New York.’
‘I could move with you. To play the piano for you.’
‘This will be your home by then. You’ll have your hat hung here. They’ll need you to talk about the lake and the houses and hills.’
‘I don’t want to live in a montage.’
‘We’re just ships in the night, you know. Ships on a lake. I’m going to learn to fly. You’ll understand when you’re older.’
I don’t understand. I rested my hand in the nest of her hair and made sure I’d remember her smell. I loved her, you see. I loved the girl who never landed.