Oslo in the Summertime

I like that song.

I should try writing again.

What can I write about?

Oslo in the Summertime?

There's a cold wind coming from another town, but I ignore that. I'm not there; I'm not where they wear jackets with little feathers and let the children slide around in the ice. I'm not "Up North," where kids with big sweaters carry around books and feel okay about their futures. Nor am I in the South, deep down where big fruit hang from small, leafy trees. Here I am, right in the middle of it all. In the middle of home. And it's here where the cold winds reach a crossroad and greet each other and move on into the next, next town. It's quite nice to sit in the middle of the city square, the foreign winds exchanging foreign greetings amidst the scene of my hair, and between my fingers they ride. I have the power to direct them. I have the power of a nation; to send the South to the West and the Northwest further North. It's not freedom, though. Freedom and power could never coexist.

I see the boy about a hundred yards away, kicking around the leaves. Mrs. Oslo always picks them up, one by one, and stacks them into sweet little piles. Then she quiets down, picks up the phone, and dials her daughter in a far off country, adding up her bills to great sums. She sits on her porch and talks quietly about politics and the weather for hours. She talks so much that I wonder if her daughter is even on the other line, or if she is just talking to herself. Maybe she talks to ghosts, is what Danny Riverton said. That kid's a hoot.

The boy is new here, I know that much. I can see it in his green eyes, which shine with wonder as he looks upwards toward my familiar sky. He counts the clouds, lays in the grass, touches the shops' windows. As he does this, he gets closer to me. I can see his brown hair and his skinny shoulders as they navigate themselves in my town. He belongs here, or he will one day. I say hello.

Hello.

It's quiet for a while until he responds.

Mrs. Oslo is full of good ideas. She told me once that if we just killed all the houses and put up tents in the city square, we could all understand each other better. She says her daughter went away to a place where they did that.

He looks at the back of his hands for a moment. Did you know that when I was little, I burnt the backs of my hands so badly, they gave me new ones? New backs on my hands, I mean. They couldn't get me new hands.

 Yes, he'll belong someday.

Well when I was little, I nearly died of a disease. No one's heard of it, so there's no use in telling you. I sit down in the wet grass and touch the spot next to me. He sits.

For the next three weeks, we talked about how we got hurt when we were little. For the two following, we talked about pets we owned that ran away and got run over, including the mysterious case of my pet fish Lolly. In the month following that, we discussed the towns we had traveled to that we wished we could have stayed in forever. After that, we couldn't find anything nice to talk about, so we just played 20 Questions.

He was a good friend, if I ever had one in a town like mine.

I learned his name after knowing him for four months, and it changed everything. He decided to tell me on a windy grey fall night. Don't you ask people's names when you meet them? 

No, why would I?

'Cause. How else could you call to them in a crowded room?

I figured out everyone's the same. Everyone wants to hear their name called out in a crowded room, so if you call something loud enough, everyone will turn to look at you.  

Well I wouldn't. I got pride. I got a name, and if you don't call it, I won't look at you.

I sat there, looking up at the emerging starlight. I saw the Big Dipper, but doesn't everybody?

It's Jady, by the way. 

The North Star is so bright that sometimes I think the sun ought to quit its job. Jady looks over at me and shakes my shoulder. He thinks I want to hear my name called out in our room, crowded with starlight and the stories Mrs. Oslo tells, but I don't. I want to keep quiet and sit still until he falls asleep and I can see if his hands are really burnt. But he keeps shaking my shoulder.

That's a good name for a kid like you. It's pretty foreign.

He's satisfied with the answer, so he picks up his body with a hop to the feet and carries on home, somewhere I don't know. Since I was little I supposed that everyone had a home to go to when conversation stopped. I supposed that there was a hiding place for everyone, if they don't like to feel to winds like I do. But when conversations stopped and Jady had to take his leave, he didn't have a hiding place. Instead, he had Mrs. Oslo. He would walk away from me slowly and toughly, skinny shoulders up high around his brown hair. He would take this old path down by the creek, and it would lead him up to a high bank where he could sit and think about me. And he would. He would think about me for a good long time, and I know he would wonder what my name is. Then, every night and every day, he would should his little brown hairs at the creek in solitude and step back to the cit square. If he spotted me sitting there, he would watch me until I left. Then when I left, he would go to Mrs. Oslo's and sleep on her couch. He did it every day.

I never got tired of his conversations, even though they would last for years sometimes. He'd stop and break and carry on the next day. But the topic would continue relentlessly for the longest time. One day I see him on the phone on Mrs. Oslo's porch.

One second please. He says to the person on the other line. He walks over to me and I see he is tired. He has been talking for too long. Who does he talk to? What ghosts? I want to ask him but he is so tired; you need to understand how tired he was. Near the point of death. So I hold him like a friend for a while, and then like a boy. When he rests against my arms, he is longer a human. He becomes a shapeless bag of ideas, a bodiless soul searching in the wrong town at the wrong time. I cannot give him the things he wants from the foreign winds. He thinks I can, I know he does. He thinks it because I have felt the winds move my body, and he think they have told me their secrets. What he doesn't know, though, is that I never listen to anything but the hum of the starlight in my ears. I didn't listen to any word he had ever said to me, and now I am glad I didn't. Mrs. Oslo, who hears nothing, listens to it all. I don't know how the lady knows what she knows, but she gave Jady the phone because he needed a ghost right then. The hum of stars is my life, there right in my bones, but Jady needs a ghost. So I hold him. I stay silent; so does he.

It's not a love story just because there's love in the nights and days we met. It would be too much to say that I ever miss him now. He lives somewhere where the cold winds come from, and he sends them off my way. He waits for me to send one back some day, but I just can't do that to him. If I did, he would come back. He would start to talk about the funny sweaters his grandparents wore or the bad habits he tried to break, and I can't hear that anymore. So I sit in silence, feeling his cold wind, wishing I could have been a ghost a long time ago.