i was three years old and you weren’t there the time i got salt in my eyes. it was the dead sea water that stung the whites of my vision red, and there was my momma, and the ocean, and the sand. you were someplace off in the big city, probably kicking a football with your friend, or kicking your friend because you were six-years old. i don’t remember a lot of things from when i was three, but i remember how the dead sea felt in my eye-sockets. my goggles must not have been slack on my face well enough, ‘cause the thin purple plastic let the sunny waves into the little coves between my eyes and the shielding of the lens. my chin began to quiver and my eyes swelled. the salt of my tears mixed with the salt from the floating sea. i clenched my fat baby fists that rested upon the plushy drumsticks of my forearms, wailing louder than the seagulls that like to pick pieces of bread off of the shores in massachusetts. i swallowed between every swollen sob, trying to down the pain that met my burning eyes. every time i ripped my eyelids from one another to try and see where my momma was, i caught a flash of sun soaked sands and colorful umbrellas that lined the shore. the people tanning and building sandcastles beneath rainbow-colored shade mocked my agony, which spun me faster than the time it took my momma to find me. when she did, she lifted my meatball body and took me to our beach chairs. she poured warm fresh water from a plastic, liter-sized bottle in my eyes and whispered, “the dead sea makes your boo-boos hurt so much, but then it makes them all better. you’ll see.”

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i was fourteen and ignorant when you were wise and told me to bring sneakers. but i didn’t and we climbed hermon and the blisters from my doc martens were a brighter red than my eyebrow the time the third grade and a tooth split it open. the next day the blisters popped and peeled off. we went to the sea and walked to the waterline and the waves licked our toes while the sun licked our backs and our tongues licked our dry lips. salt crystals encrusted the edge of the goldenrod sands, and our calloused feet pressed against the milk and honey mix of the shoreline. your eyes matched the frame of my brother’s bike back home and you used them to convince my mustard irises to gaze into the sea with you. you dipped yourself into the bathtub-warm waters, so of course i tried to follow. but the salt in the sea hissed at me, sizzling the stubborn red lumps on my heels. you waded in further, so i did too. your peach-fuzz arms spread themselves against the buoyant blue and i saw the drought in your lungs spill into the sea with a thirsty cough. your sunbaked soul matched the yellows of the desert, but the greys of my new england winter rustled up beneath my ribs, the warmth of the place that had rejected me heating the place i only “called” home.

your blonde knuckles caught the sweat that dripped from your forehead, your body-salt meshing with the dead-sea salts that so heavily claim to make skin soft. you washed it all off under the sweet water that sprung from a small towering spout when you pulled the chain. we tossed our dripping swim trunks into the back of the minivan that kept us baking in the sun for two-hours until its engine started up.

so while we stood melting like the fallen popsicles on the big city boardwalks, you held the phone to your ear and your father whispered news of the sirens in the place where the popsicles melt. the same place where women with sloshing thighs scurry their wide hips to the bomb shelters only to meet panicked store clerks or hotel employees who begged their bosses to let the children in, under the concrete. i’d seen it before. i mean, i had been it before. so when your father told of dead boys in a manner so siren-like, the corners of my sunlit skin drooped to my quivering chin.

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i’ll be fifteen when you’re enlisted and the blood on the boys in news might be the blood on you. and this blood might be gushing from a wound that’s not the kind that you can pour iodine onto-- like you’d do with the scrapes on your knees when you were little, after you’d fall running to the playground. i used the same iodine on our shared blood that caked my knees thousands of miles away. and we both cried because we were scared of the playground scars we had. now the world’s not a playground, it’s a warzone. but damn it, you’re still a little kid. so now i rub the nape of my neck, worrying that you’ll be wiping blood off of your childhood friend’s face, or he’ll be wiping yours, in the places where sweat used to drip. and i know the dead sea could never make the wound of losing you any better.