All around me, reptile skin, rocks and noses and lips with the sheen of twenty-somethings who have just made love.

It is all of the things that I associate with camping: being unshowered, unshaven, with slept-in clothing molded to the skin and that dried sweat feeling under the arms and between the legs. I always looked from the safe vantage point of an air-conditioned room in an apartment with a clean bathroom and new fixtures, where I could shower immediately after getting up and wash off the night slime.

With my face in the middle reflected back, it all surrounds me. Such an ache I feel, mourning for those times my spectral mind kept me from backpacking through country after country for weeks on end, body crusted over with road dirt.

The flesh memories of youth lie in smell, taste, and touch. Mine are not flesh but stored on a chip, time spent alone in darkened movie theaters or at a desk scribbling obsessive ruminations about what I regretted not doing in the past, and what I would regret not doing in the present, which, now, is so long ago.

Yet there I am, for better or worse, surrounded by the unshowered, unshaven moments from the lives of others that they remember like they were a moment ago, on dry, dirty rocks.

“I still remember the feel of the slime on the frogs,” she says, “we held hands and watched the sun set, and our fingers slid back and forth as we each felt the other's knuckles.”

She smiles.

“We squished mud between our toes and we kissed and we tasted the dirt on each other's lips.”

And as she speaks, I am there in the middle of that story, listening, listening, listening. And I will just be quiet and let her talk. And their story of the rocks and the frogs and the flesh will not die, because I preserve it.

And there is more to preserve.

“So, what happened next,” I ask.

Her face lights up.

“Oh, you'll never believe it.”

And there I am in the middle listening.

“Tell me,” I say.