ABSTRACT
We met when I was four years old and knew each other until the day he died when I was eleven. We went everywhere together and shared everything. In the summer-times we used to lie on our backs and stare up at the sky. Like generations of young people before us, we tried to work out what shapes the clouds made in their slow journey across the sky. The grass and leaves would stick like paint on his pants and mine as we talked the hot afternoons away to the sounds of cicadas. We climbed trees, built cubby houses out of Queensland box branches laid against pillows of melaleuca shrubbery and hid from our enemies there. We laughed a lot, cried together a little. There were no closer, no better friends than us.
