Ways We Passed the Time, 1987-1997

Your parents had a small collection of antique coffee grinders and we would sit on your back porch and grind handfuls of frozen beans, occasionally feeding them to the cat. Later that summer, your younger brother trimmed its whiskers off.

You tried to convince me that the cat poop in the sandbox behind your house was actually a collection of Tootsie Rolls.

We sat in a red cement tube on the playground and softly whispered all the curse words we knew to each other, progressively raising our voices until one of us gave up. Many years later, this would be popularized by an indy-yipster romcom as The Penis Game.

We challenged each other to rounds of pinball in my parents’ den. I beat you over and over again. You began to cry as the final ball shot into the gutter. I offered to let you keep the single quarter we used to fuel the machine.

You let me paint your toenails with Urban Decay Spare Change nail polish while we sipped contraband Pepsi in your bedroom. Later, during a dramatic break up, you explained that you would be removing the polish, thus symbolically erasing all memories of me.