When the night has come, and the land is dark…

Ever see "Stand by Me?" Old early 80s movie with River Phoenix, based off of a Stephen King story. It’s about the friendship of young boys, in that painfully sweet nostalgic manor that only Stephen King seems to deliver. I can not put my finger on it exactly, and neither can Stephen King, but there is a particular harmony between the sober reflection and sentimental fondness that he seems to tap into, and my own similar fondness for the same. His stories are seldom stand-alone period pieces of children in the past, but rather always seem to contrast the long-ago with the present; the bright yellow morning light of youth with the blue dusk of middle-age. There is always at least one character who begins the tale in modern times, submerging himself in his own relative memories of childhood, before again returning at the end to bridge and compare the two separate realities. The final words of the movie, just before the title song and the credits cue, speak sad and subtle volumes;

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?

This follows an account of what became of his peers in the span of time between the character’s intimate childhood and adulthood. He recounts how two of the four seemingly inseparable boys faded from his life, a retrospective off-hand comment that seems to clash violently with the amount of significance the boys seemed to carry over one another during the tale of their adventure…but at the same time, it seems to make the utmost sense, as we compare his childhood to our own, and acknowledge that even in our own lives, significance as an entity fades, reshapes it’s face, and fades again. An intimate confidant in one time can easily fade and slide into just another face in the crowd, if even that…

What resonates most with the story, and gives it a sense of timelessness, is not the tale of the boys first steps into man-hood, or the triumph of friendship, but the bittersweet sense of loss that seems to hang over the overall story like an old leaning tree. It is the act of watching a once immortal potential die a swift and painful death, as both we and the characters are forced to bear witness…