love like this

when I was 5, the great love of my life, cody-from-across-the-street moved away.

for several glorious months, we avouched our love affair by trading pushes on the swings and licks from our handi-snacks cheese and cracker packets. we lived the summer in the sun, swinging our feet over the pool in his back yard and re-enacting that week's episode of SuperFriends, which he had to recap for me since I wasn't allowed to watch it. of course, I was always wonderwoman, and my wonderwoman action figure even had a detachable lasso. and cuffs that lit up. but I was always envious of his plastic man, which had been stretched beyond repair from an episode in which he had been stretched around the earth and tied hand to foot at the north pole. sadly, he didn't quite reach around my globe, and worse yet, he never recovered.

I didn't even know he was moving away until one day he was no longer there. and to mark the end of our summer together, was a shallow grave under the pink rose bush in our front yard.

my dad was weeding when he found the poorly dug hole. he rooted around for a couple of minutes and then came into the house to find me. "I think these must be yours", he said, holding out his hand. and when he uncurled his fingers, lying in his palm, were plasticman and the atom.

a summer in two sun-warmed bits of colored injection-molded plastic.