Your sneakers – a pair of old yellow Vans – remind me of when I used to walk. Dirt stains the toes a mushy gray color, and fresh mud crusts across the non-existent arches. I wish my shoes still looked like that. 

A little hole starts to peek through the worn canvas near your big toe, and I’m starting to feel jealous. You got to keep all of the things that ran too fast for me to catch. I want to forget that because I like the heavy thud skate shoes make on pavement a little too much. I can’t really make that sound myself anymore, and I miss when I could without pain. 

Your skateboard is another thing that makes me melancholy. The grit of plastic wheels across the cracks in the street makes me feel oddly nostalgic. I wish I could make that sound sometimes and do cool tricks. I only have one trick and it’s a pathetic 360 wheelie, but for some reason you still like it. I guess it’s enough for me to pretend that I’m really like you. In moments of teenage obsession, you try to get me on the quarter pipe at the skatepark but I’m too scared that I’ll wreck my wheelchair. You tell me to let go and live a little, but you have no clue how much this chair cost. If I told you, I’d ruin the moment. So I don’t. I’ve been told that I’m pretty good at that – ruining the moment. A sudden slide across a curb makes me wish that I brought a first aid kit in my backpack, but that would ruin the moment too. You get the right to be reckless that I wasn’t gifted. It pisses me off. 

I don’t hate you for it, but you also get the right to be completely oblivious – a right I never had. We share some glass bottles of Mexican Coke after baking in the sun for a few hours and it’s time for me to take my meds again. You chuckle to yourself as I wash down my afternoon dose with pure sugar. You joke, “Hey, can you pass me an Oxy?” You don’t regret saying it, though I have half of the mind to make you. However, I have to market myself carefully. My pills aren’t taken for fun. They’re a fine $400 cocktail of Earth’s most deadly natural substances bottled specifically to subdue spazzes like me. I wish I didn’t have to take pills four times a day to feel comfortable in my own body, but to you, it’s just a joke. You remind me why it’s hard for me to make able-bodied friends.

I try not to be standoffish the rest of the time we hang out: it’s been a good day, and we were having such a fun time. You offer to push me home and I oblige. It’ll give me time to convince myself that I shouldn’t regret leaving my house this morning. When I finally revert to the safety of my personal IKEA ripoff, I turn on the small radio sitting on my windowsill. I keep it there for the days I’m in so much pain that I can’t get out of bed, but you don’t know about those. The lyrics to “Pretty Girls (The Mover)” by Against Me! ring out: “I just want to be young, I want to live/ God, I want to be healthy, I don’t want this problem/ You wouldn’t think something like irresponsibility would complicate something like asking for some company/ but there are things you must accept as said and done … You’ll always wake the same person in the same place.”

So here are all of the things I wanted to say: I’m jealous of all of the things you don’t even realize that you have. I get angry when you think that I’m like you and when I’m the only one intuitive enough to recognize that I’m not. No matter what, I’m still going to feel alone even when I’m right next to you because you got to keep the innocence I lost at a young age. And no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be able to understand the emptiness that fills me with. It’s said and done. Do you still like me now?

There are a lot of things that I want to tell you but you wouldn’t understand, let alone fathom. Like about the three pairs of Vans I keep neglected in my closet, along with the other shoes I can’t bring myself to wear anymore. I can’t wear Vans (my feet are far too abused from years of uncorrected walking) and my favorite pair of Converse remain virtually untouched in my closet. That’s the easiest place to start. My limited edition Andy Warhol Statue of Liberty Converse sit on a shelf collecting dust because the last time I wore them, I saw someone almost die. So I like to pretend that they don’t exist anymore. It’s easier for me to decide that you couldn’t handle that story and leave it be, in the quiet. I don’t want to ruin the moment.