Ethan’s house was located two blocks away from mine and confidently stood within the carefully planned patterns of a town containing thousands of identical front lawns, fences, houses, and streets. His dwelling, in all its suburban, middle class, Long Island glory, was where a sizeable slice of my youth took place, with the time I spent on his property firmly declaring its spot in my mind as the fondest of childhood memories. Most of my surviving childhood memories seem closely connected to him and his house.

Ethan’s house was a cold house. Wooden floors were walked upon and appeared newly waxed upon each visit; beige drywalls curated staged family photographs; a china cabinet finely constructed out of mahogany displayed little china; an ornate mirror, positioned near the house’s entrance, ruthlessly reminded visitors of their appearance.

This forbidding abode, with its sterile atmosphere, had me enthralled. With a floor plan structurally different than my house, it seemed grand in my juvenile eyes that we, two friends who could never be apart, had this museum at our fingertips to spend our time and engage in childhood indulgences within. We played lengthy rounds of hide-and-seek and were able to use all the rooms in his house; movie after movie after movie was watched and rewound in his VCR when it rained outside; we had endless conversations on trivial topics that were of profound importance to us; we took the bus to his house and raced through our homework in his kitchen before rushing off to play pretend in his backyard. Those days, full of droll activities, reminded us that we were young. They solidified our bond not only as friends, but as brothers.

Like the duration of the pop songs Ethan and I consumed on summer days, our friendship came to an abrupt stop. Following his parents’ divorce, he distanced himself from me and all I could do was wonder why. For a while, I believed it was my fault; perhaps I said something that offended him or did something that he found irksome. Either way, Ethan started looking at me differently. Suddenly, I was treated with the same regard as a stranger, looked at contemptuously through eyes which once shared the same perspectives as mine. Sitting next to each other on the school bus became painful, for the silence between us caused a torture more intense than any spoken utterance could have inflicted. The stinging silence revealed itself again six years later, long after we ceased being brothers, when he looked the other way after I attempted to speak to him in the high school hallway.

In the hues of summer mornings and on crisp autumnal afternoons, I ride my bike around my town. On my path, Ethan’s old house flashes past on my right, and each glimpse I catch of it, I am reminded of where my childhood took place and where another couple’s children are now experiencing theirs. For years, the outside appearance of the house has remained just as it did the last day I walked out of its doors. Then, something changed.

On one midsummer twilight, I saw a construction company parked outside the house with the back gates open. Men were lumbering rotten pieces of infested wood onto their trucks and I watched from the other side of the lane like an onlooker at a friend’s funeral I was not invited to. I mourned, paying my respects to the detached limbs of a swing set, dispatched to the incinerator. The sight that startled me the most was when the swings, dilapidated chunks of deep green plastic and flaky strands of once pristine plastisol-coated chains, were nonchalantly thrown onto the flatbed of the truck.

Ethan and I once flew on those swings. The swings once moved like a pendulum as rays of sun were absorbed into my bright, blond hair and radiated out of Ethan’s hopeful, green eyes. The swings once lifted us. They raised us above his house, my house, our town, and all of Long Island, transporting us to a realm that neither one of us has been able to revisit since our childhood, but one I quixotically enter each time I remember. The years we shared are imprinted onto our beings; they are beauty marks staining our skin. As enticing as forgetting is in certain cases, there is nothing that can stop us from bearing our shared past. And there is nothing that can stop us from occasionally being pulled back into a once shared culture that drowns us in an ephemeral nostalgia that defines what simplicity and innocence once was.

–Salvatore Casto