I hadn’t always wanted the roller skates, but once I did, it was as if I’d experienced no prior existence to the longing. It consumed me all day, but especially in the evenings when I’d be solving for X on scrap paper at the tiny two-drawer desk by the window in my bedroom, the one you glided past on eight little plastic wheels night after night. I’d watch you fly down the small-town street, which demonstrated an incline that made you seem as if you were flying from the waist up, the skates carrying you towards gravity’s center with such propelled purpose, the wind seemed to sigh its appreciation as you cut through it.
I’d just found my inaugural armpit hair in our mildew-scented basement the night the wanting made itself known. I stood barefoot on the cold cement floor while I waited for the water in the only shower in the house to run warm with steam. It had caught my attention as I stretched naked with my hands clasped above my head, avoiding looking at my body south of my collarbone. It had almost made me cry, and I was still afraid of tears that came from things other than sadness, from feelings that I couldn’t yet give language to. These ones seemed to come from an understanding, some inevitability that made them known with warmth in my cheeks but without allowing for their visceral release. It made me think of the armpit hair I’d see on older boys at the high school, wearing tank tops with chalky bits of deodorant sticking the wiry stragglers together, an image that seemed so far removed from the person I understood myself to be. It made me feel stagnant and stuck, like the skin on the bottom of my feet had melded with the peeling gray paint that coated the basement floor.
I saw you for the first time that night as I returned to my room. I’d told my father and my brother good night while they watched procedural television in the living room like they did without me every night. It was assumed I wasn’t interested, that I couldn’t share their interests due to our obvious differences, and I’d learned to accept their assumptions at a young age. I’d taken off my towel and dressed myself as quickly as possible in a sweater and basketball shorts, not looking at my body, never looking at my body, and now not looking at the hair. I sat at the desk to write in my journal, something about the chalky deodorant pit hairs and my own single sprout and the rain that just let up but drowned out the rest of the week. Your crop of burgundy hair caught my eye first, shining like a penny beneath the first streetlight you passed below. Your garments flowed behind you as you coasted, your hair that probably stopped mid-spine flowing with you, a perpetual state of forward motion. You never seemed to stop or to be heading anywhere in particular. You were coasting, comfortable with just being, with an ongoing existence amidst the unknown. I couldn’t tell if you were a boy or a girl. I never really could, day or night. I wanted to fly how you could, so seamlessly and carefree. Instead, I stayed in my chair, stuck on the sprout and my journal. I drew you, scratchy lines and smudged in shading, trying to capture your demure look of immunity, though it was futile trying to capture something so free. I landed on drawing the skates, only the skates, and their eight plastic wheels. I stared at my drawing until my vision grew blurry with sleep, a static agent of movement.
My days were simple after seeing you for the first time, as simple as they always were. I’d float through them, going to school where I’d see the chalky deodorant-clad pit hairs in the locker room and listen to other kids whisper about how I was weird, how I was different, how something was off. I’d come home and eat a quiet dinner with my father and my brother, listening to them talk about sports and girls at school and never expecting me to participate. I went through the motions until the evening when I could sit at my two-drawer desk and watch you from my window, sailing uninhibited through the evening air. Nothing seemed to matter other than the anticipation of finding your drifting shadow in the streetlight once more. A form with no outline. A body with no name. A being with no attachments. A means to a release from a shackle whose keeper I’d never quite identified.
I begged my father for my own pair of skates, but he didn’t understand why I needed them. He wouldn’t get them for me despite my asking for them for birthdays and holidays. I’d unwrap boxes anticipating the sovereignty of eight little plastic wheels and ruby red laces and instead find ties and belts and button-down shirts, more things that kept me tethered to the life I’d been assigned. He couldn’t understand why I needed them. He couldn’t understand anything about me, my need for release from the stagnant nature of my days in this house with him and my brother living lives I’d never understand myself despite an expectation to emulate them.
I had to make a way for myself. I couldn’t sit and watch you roll down my street any longer, your shadow flowing from one pool of streetlight to the next until you were gone for the evening, released from the burden of perception. I saved every ounce of my allowances, and I raised money doing odd jobs like mowing lawns and picking up the crabapples in the neighbor’s backyards. When I’d finally raised enough, I bought them. They were secondhand from The Village Thrift for a steal. They were made of the lightest, most delicate camel-colored leather with red and pink woven laces and four orange wheels on each one that were scratched and worn from years of use. I sat at my desk only to lace them up, glancing out the window to see if you’d come past. You never did.
When I went outside, my legs wobbled at first, the wheels rolling beneath me in a way that felt alien and made me afraid of wiping out. I got the hang of them before long, however, skating circles in my driveway where I could see the shadows of my dad and my brother in the glow of the TV through the lacy curtains hung by the house’s bay window, the scratching of the wheels and the clicking of the cicadas the only sounds in the air. When I felt confident enough, getting to a place where I was doing figure eights and skating backwards, I took to the top of the street, the hill that you coasted down night after night. I waited as the sun set before me, expecting you to skate past me at any moment, the midwestern sky’s blue turning orange and then pink and then a deeper, more isolating blue. The streetlights hummed to life, one by one, glowing small dots of life up the road, slowly, until they each powered on fully and spilled circular pools of propitious light on the asphalt while the sky became an all-consuming black. I lost patience in waiting and let the wheels take control. I gave in to the pull of the inevitable.
I wondered how I looked coasting down the street through the window at my desk. Did I flow like you? Were my clothes and my hair and my body all one in the rushing air, existing in harmony, making sense? A form with no outline, a body with no name, a being with no attachments? I would never know because I wasn’t there to watch.
At the bottom of the hill, there sat a park I’d never stepped foot in before: a small block of fresh grass and a swing set and some benches. It welcomed me knowingly, the lush green of the grass a safe space that had been there all along, waiting for me to find my own wheels. I fell to my knees in the grass, surely staining the skin there a wet, scratchy green. I pushed myself to my behind, my palms wetting themselves with the early evening dew and making me alarmingly aware of the body that contained me, that had always held me down. I stared up at the hill and there you were. You stood at the top, where the earth seemed to round out and threaten to roll you over its edge. I waited for you to kick off, but you never did, and before long I wondered if you were really there at all. I took the roller skates off my feet, not quite sure why I’d wanted them in the first place. Then I cried, sitting in the grass while the tears reached past the heat in my cheeks and finally allowed themselves to teeter over the edge. The same tears that couldn’t form in the basement, not from understanding, but confusion. I pushed myself up and held my skates between pinched fingers. I walked home in my dampening socks, heavy but not stuck.