"summer is coming," exclaimed the rabbit, "it's coming to wash us away."

"there's a ledge not far from the quarry, past stevens point and the running spring, where simon and the others played freeze-tag with the kids from mansfield, where jenny and sean hurled rocks at the stars like comets in reverse, and where stacy, dressed in blue jeans and a shirt with an armadillo on it that she bought from the thrift store on 2nd, the one with the mannequin in a tuxedo, threw herself into the morning sun."

andy and i had known each other for almost five years, since homecoming senior year, and we were friends. we would get together with the rest of the group every now and again and talk about what it was that we expected to happen after high school and compare those answers to the reality of it all. we'd talk and reminisce about what we called the "good times", even though the times we considered "bad", the ones we used to validate our "good" ones, never held up to their label. but it wasn't until the last few months that we became, what she would call, good friends.

april 15, 1957 - a scribbled note on magazine cover

"caroline left to today. packed up without a sound. without a note. nothing to punctuate the end of eight months of, well, what was it really? i don't know. i let her go, like most everything else, without a fight. without word or worry. what that must have been like for her? to give and give and give and get fractions in return. to put it all out there and never reel anything back in. made of unequal parts, caroline and me. i haven't been able to feel that for some time now. since high school. maybe. to care for something, to love something, to want to be apart of something. of someone. of a greater whole. instead we're just fractions. i don't want that anymore. i want to feel something, care for something, know something, share something. love something enough to not let it walk out the door. "

regarding the last few months, or, an open letter to those who apologies apply to

i'm not very good at things of this sort, but that's probably already obvious. i'm not the right kind of man to be the kind of man that you may need. not now, at least. things happen. people happen. events happen. i've never been one to handle any of this or that with any sort of grace or compassion, at least not at the right levels. passivity and disregard are the tools of communication that i employ. for that i am sorry. sorry because of what this has led to. sorry because i can't handle such situations like a normal person, or, at least, like how i think a person should handle them. sorry because i never wanted to be that kind of person. sorry because i just never cared enough. and therein lies the issue. because i did care. i just couldn't express it. a fear of commiting, of admitting, of realizing that i care.

things never plan out the way you want them to or think them to. the way you see them in your head. in the theater of the subconscious. i would live there, if i could. i would function there. we would function there. and it would be, like it should have been, good.

part one

sam and i were pretty good friends. in the summer that followed what had been our 12th, and ultimately our last, year of school we took a trip to lake carlson. we wanted to hike mt. sherman. i had mentioned the idea to sam before, months prior to our adventure, while she was on holiday with her family in alaska. "the only way to start off the most epic summer ever!" i had written on plain white paper, scribbling little stick figures of the two of us atop the mountain. she came back before having the chance to write me in return. but the feeling stayed. and throughout the coming months until just recently we planned our adventure.