return to the abandoned theatre: 2

The park is filled with the light that comes between summer and autumn - spilled gold, fading in and out over the grass. In the shadows, thoughts of the October ghosts are waiting. And a friend and I are sitting on the grass eating the last of the season's strawberries.

"Do you remember the abandoned theatre?" he says.

"Sometimes... on days like today the memory seems distant," I say. I look around the sun-filled park, the leaves clinging to light, and can't sense a trace of the musty darkness that lingers in the corners of my mind.

"I've been remembering it lately," he says.

I think about midnight, and lonely times. Sometimes the memory sneaks up on me - I find it at the bottom of a glass, under a couch cushion, in the flicker of a television turning off. But most of all, it's in the boredom of stale summer and too many nights when I can't sleep. The sudden memory is like a presence, a ghost of my past self reaching out to me.

"I think I've been remembering it, too," I say. "Somehow, after everything, it's still there."