He had hands like tree branches, with vines the curled and crept between my own to take root. He brought me green apples on afternoons in late spring, and I remember the pads of his fingers, warm and rough and creeping up the curve of my elbow. It was a time of swinging feet, flower crowns and scab picking. It began like that.

When I try and remember him now (eyes shut tight, lashes against the rise of my cheekbone and hands clasped over the roll in the center of my stomach) there are two instances that I can recall more vividly than others. In one, he is small, just taller than me and thrown backwards. I remember that there was red dirt under my fingernails from the baseball field I had dragged him through so that we might reach this spot in the woods. Hands clasped, we’d hopped the fence and run across first base, pausing to catch our breath and jump about on the pitchers mound before breaking back into a run. My toe caught on third base and I fell forward, one hand outstretched, the other still clutching his, pulling him forward and into the descent. We fell, and I scraped the heels of my palms on the deep red gravel, russet and the color of that summer. We laughed, and he jumped up, spry and half-awkward, coltish and joyful. This is how I like to remember him, in shades of red, brown and green, his chest heaving and cheeks colored red and stretched. I remember him like this—with a half smile, delighted and reaching down to me to lift me from the soil, smiling.

If I close my eyes tighter to remember again, press my lashes to the bone and curl inward on myself, that second lucid image of him unfurls from the place where I had it pressed and tucked away. Curled and crying, I remember that the air was cool, even though it was an especially stagnant May. I remember tracing the curve of his spine with my fingers, concentric circles in the small of his back, and the pad of my thumb at the nape of his neck. His arms stretched in front of him, long expanses of flesh like a canvas in child’s pose or prayer. I told him that I was not looking at the gouges that stretched from his shoulder to the soft place under his wrist and onwards to the start of his palm that I had held a summer ago. I promised I was not looking at the bruises, dark serpents from the damaged veins in the crook of his elbow and creeping down and around his arm. I told him I was not looking and I traced concentric circles on his back, getting smaller and smaller until they disappeared into nothing and then started all over again.