...ing -2003- Direct

I swam up. Broke the surface. Gasped.

Everything was still. Too still. The other kids were kicking, splashing, laughing in slow-motion bubbles. But I saw them the way you see figures in a snow globe after the shake—frozen in the middle of a gesture. My best friend, Jenny, her mouth open mid-shout. Mark, his arm raised to throw a Frisbee that hung in the murk like a pale moon. ...ing -2003-

But sometimes, late at night, I still feel it. The flicker. The skip. The world holding its breath in 2003, waiting to become the world we actually got. I swam up

The summer of 2003 was not supposed to be the one where I learned to drown. It was supposed to be the summer of learning to drive, of grazed knees from skateboards we were too old for, of the stale taste of pool chlorine and cheap cherry cola. Instead, it was the summer the air turned to glass. Everything was still

It started with a flicker. Not a light bulb—something deeper. A flicker in the space between cable channels, in the static hiss after 2 AM. My friends called it boredom. I called it a waiting. We’d lie on the roof of Mark’s parents’ garage, passing a single stolen cigarette back and forth, and watch the sky do nothing. Absolutely nothing. No stars. No planes. Just a thick, bruise-colored silence pressing down on our subdivision.

That was the summer of the -ing. Every verb became a trap. Feeling. Failing. Forgetting. Faking. I’d write the word "living" on my hand in ballpoint pen, and by noon it would smear into a bruise. My mother said I was just moody. My father handed me the car keys and said, “Go drive somewhere. Get it out of your system.” But there was nowhere to go. Every road led back to the same cul-de-sac, the same lawn sprinklers clicking like a countdown clock.