Best Friends Forever

Between them, everything is shorthand. It takes years to forge a language of understood nods, devilish grins, and wrinkled brows. Scene partners on the set of their own televised variety show, they pretend for a live audience. A banana is not just a fruit, it is also a phone, a smile, a boomerang. Anything is real if it’s believed.

Bundled in balaclavas and bright knits drenched in primary colors, they resemble jeweled chameleons. Brave voyagers to this new playground, Cunxiao and Eming invite photographer Alicia Shi and us along to explore. Under golden arches, bets are declared on who can go higher. Two pendulums in tandem, they swing like the legs of a synchronized swimmer.

Philosophers hate the banality of school. Getting an education is not always learning; hubris is often confused with earnestness. Modern day poets spend their time in leisure: skating, daydreaming, loitering until it’s no longer fun. Their parents would be exasperated by such aimlessness, as if they have forgotten how they spent their days. Your neck will stretch with your head in the clouds, they warn.

The boys are too dizzy to declare a winner. Toppling into soft brush, they work to catch their breath as the underneath swims and the sky takes shape. Cunxiao waves his limbs to leave an imprint. Tomorrow, it will no longer be there. They have yet to learn the rarity of permanence. Eming points to a cloud that looks like his childhood pet rabbit, its fur just as white, before stirring awake.

How long were we asleep for?