Watermelon Memories

            We used to listen to the same music track on repeat — a somnolent hip-hop beat with dreamlike lyrics. She liked it that way. We’d indulge in every note again and again, the same way we’d indulge in each other.

            Those summer nights I’d stay late and we’d lie together on the sofa in the small lounge at the back of her house. We’d start by watching a movie on her TV, sitting side-by-side, holding hands and leaning against one another. Eventually the movie would end, or the disc would skip and pause, and the screen would paint the dark room in its ambient twilight. Then we would hold each other and we would kiss and caress under blankets.

Her perfume would work its way into my t-shirt and would linger there long after I left, usually at two or three in the morning. I would tiptoe across her creaky floorboards so as not to wake her parents. And I would make the drive home bleary-eyed, forcing myself to move against that force that always seemed to want to draw me back to her arms and to the warmth and comfort of that room.

Those memories are distant now. But I can still feel the dryness of my contact lenses as I drove home. I have a faint memory of that perfume; the other day I smelled it again and in this world, a continent and almost two decades away, I found myself back in that lounge. I would like to also feel that love again, its pins and needles and sweet exhaustion. But its time has passed, and that is okay.

It’s the taste of watermelon that has stayed with me. On one of those summer nights, before we made our way to the sofa in the lounge, we sat and talked together in a kitchen lit rebelliously against the night — one of those scenes you glimpse while walking through a neighborhood after sunset, looking in on the lives of other people, their house dark except for that one room illuminating a moment of their lives. Perhaps this memory has endured so long because it is one of the few times I remember belonging on the inside. I was meant to be there with her in the light of that kitchen. Since then, more often than not I find myself belonging to the outside, looking in. I did not know then how good I had it.

Truth be told, I was always intimidated by those rooms. Her father was a doctor and they lived just a few houses down from the Denver Country Club. I grew up simpler — our family never poor, but still living under the stresses of making ends meet. The rooms of her house held a grandeur that I had never known before. The amplitude threatened me and I felt I always had to be bigger in order to fill the space.

The way I remember it, it had been one of those particularly hot summer days before that evening fell. At night I could feel the residual heat pulsing from her driveway as I walked up to the side door and she let me in. She was wearing one of the spaghetti-strap tops she would always wear.

I don’t know what we talked about then in the kitchen. We usually talked about our dreams in life, who we wanted to become, what we wanted to do. It is funny to write this now and to know that I exist in the future that those two teenagers could only imagine.

Her golden retriever sat happily at my feet. I sat on a barstool against the kitchen island. She brought out a Tupperware of seedless watermelon that had been cubed and sat chilling in the refrigerator all day. As we talked, we picked up cubes with our fingers and let their coolness dissolve in our mouths.

At one point she leaned over to kiss me and her mouth still held the cold and flavor of the watermelon. We were both surprised by the pleasure of it. Then we ate the watermelon piece by piece and kissed each other after every one, relishing each sensation of warm lips and cold breath and the taste of watermelon.

Those are some of the sweetest kisses I’ve ever had. They are the most vivid in my memory. I’ve never tried to replicate them because they belong to those two dreamers, then. Those two young lovers kissing in a lit kitchen, on a summer’s night, as the heat dissipates on the sidewalk. “The busy street is empty, whistling winds are blowing gently, listening intently to all of the things they have to say.”