Rolling

On the rainy summer nights, we would go skateboarding in parking garages buried five stories underground. We would bring bright fluorescent lights and illuminate the dusty catacombs where people would supposedly park during the day. The garage was a place where skating took on an entirely different world. When you landed a trick, the garage would give a standing ovation; the sound vibrating through all five floors of parking spaces. When you fell, the echoes would never let you forget that you messed up and you weren’t perfect. By the end of the summer we were the most battered blood donors in town; we were heroes.

When we were not conquering or falling we would roll around on the smooth, polished concrete floor and fall into a kicking and pushing rhythm, rolling through the shadows and around the building supports. Our own shadows would cross paths with the structural shadows, in a natural blend of strength and defiance. Some of our own shadows fell to film, giving us our best summer montage material yet. The roles of film would make their way into cardboard boxes and then into a basement, where the same shadows that were cast in the parking garage walls, would be cast once again, rolling on the smooth concrete floor. The dust and echoes would leave an even more defined image in our minds; the empty acoustics of the parking garage reverberating in our minds for years and the dust rising from the concrete floor with every pounding pulse.