Three Things I Will Never Write About

I will not write about the time you and I sat in the woods at the end of your road, fourteen years old and brave in that stupid teenage way, learning to smoke and flicking lit matches into a wet pile of leaves.  I won’t tell how, fifteen minutes later, we were back in your room and pretending to only then be getting up for the day and heard sirens wailing closer and closer until they dopplered past your house.  Your street was a dead end; they could only be going to the woods. 

We yawned in our little-girl pajamas and asked your mother what was going on.  “Oh, some vagrants caught the woods on fire,” she said.  We asked for pancakes and plopped down in front of the television, laughing in that stoned teenage way as we watched Scooby-Doo, worried about getting caught but not about whether or not we had done something wrong. 

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I won’t ever write about the night you knocked on my door, a toothless woman–a skeleton, really, with hungry red eyes–on your arm and promising to go clean as long as I could get you both through the night.  I will keep secret the way you sat on the couch, twitching and muttering to yourself, while she took my two hundred dollars down to Harlem.  That was the longest hour the world has ever known. 

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I will write, “…the over-ripe sweetness of paw-paws in summer, the juice running down our chins.”  I will write, “…the taste of my own flowers in the honey…” and “…he held the knife deftly, his brow furrowed in concentration like a painter before an easel.”  I will say that it tasted like a far-off country and still also like something from childhood.  But I will never write that your secret ingredient was nutmeg, pilfered from the shelf of your Croation landlady and carried across an ocean to flavor my summer.  Your secret is safe with me.