five things.

i. what you don’t understand and maybe never will is that i keep chasing these city lights like they’ll lead me home, i would say if i craved pavements and a small cranny in a town easy to be swallowed up by. but i don’t. i am undone by the snap of apples from trees and dusty backroads, brought to pieces and fragmented by the many ways of morning on fields finding autumn. you need the city, yes, but i need a place far from those black tar roads.

ii. eggs in the morning and bare feet in the grass. tell me i am a symphony that will last longer than the sustained note. sooner or later, the piano will fall mute, but does that make us deaf? you can find me in the daybreak and i will be singing in these plains like they are my own.

iii. let me be your last goodbye and you can be my only hello. i still cry at firsts and i still cry at lasts even though sometimes i can’t tell the difference.

iv. in the summer it slowed and we danced. i will write that someday with hands wrinkled by a life of holding close and in my hands i will let go let go let go so that others may hold on. passing down traditions like family heirlooms is more than telling. it takes a lifetime to learn how to let go and not lose it, how to give and keep.

v. and one day, you will understand that this was your life. there will be a knock at the door or the deepest of breaths or one last laugh cry word. i hope you remember each sunrise and i hope that you can name all the colors that were your favorite and i hope there are memories intertwined with each shade. mostly, i hope you will breathe out joy because this world is too heavy and you’re going home. (yes)

they talk about missing people as if it’s something they only feel, like the scratching and melting of pulling on old sweater, or the hollow shudder winter leaves in your bones. but it’s less like only feeling and more like living with an ache that becomes as much a part of you as your fingers or how your eyes disappear when you laugh or the freckles that find your face in the summer.

with features, you can pinpoint each one, and so it is with missing. monday morning and I am missing you, tuesday afternoon and I am missing you, wednesday all day and I am still missing you. you carry the culmination of the moments, in small and simple ways, and in the end it didn’t matter if they were good or bad, just that they were and for once, that was enough.

characterized by when : when he played with your hair, when your favorite smell of was lemon and wood, when you listened to the same album seventy times and swore you’d never get tired of it. marked by how : you picked blueberries almost every morning that summer, you biked to the sleepy town with him and skinned your knee, you lived in his sweatshirt smelling like rain. and more often than not, it’s by what it’s missing : cheap pizza by candlelight, a hand to hold, someone to understand your movie references, a way to say I love you without any words.

and when they talked about being born with a word on your tongue, you were the one who  came to mind. you must have swallowed stardust from all the nights under the skies and sometimes there is evidence in the way you shatter, piece by piece, when the morning awakes. you have secrets too deep for dawn and a soul too rich for afternoon, when everything is pale blue shadows and pastel like easter eggs dipped too briefly.

tell me about the summer, you say, and I tell you of freckles and a butter yellow sun and the way my hair smells of salt. no. there is a shake of your head and your eyes are melting, freezing, melting in this shifting snow and sun of february. tell me about what it is, not what it has. there is an easiness to you that helps loosen my tongue and I am quick to spill words and spread my cards over the table, carefully, explaining each move. see! this is my hand. somewhere between the story about how I almost fell in the lake and to how I cried flying home last summer, you found the cracks in me I patched haphazardly from cataloguing every sunrise.

is that where home is, you ask, again, and for a minute, I am grateful that you have seen all the raw parts of me and are not afraid. the words find my tongue, it was, but I swallow them. I am content with sunsets and sand on my skin and cheap coffee to keep me driving, white knuckled at two in the morning. one thing you will never learn is that halfway home is no place at all and I cannot trade the blue blue sky stretched tight for the shadows of starlight, no matter how much they shimmer.

I’m not allowing myself to buy a Pumpkin Spice Latte until it’s under 50 degrees.

was just crazy blessed by one of my best friends ever. still crying.

ran and it felt so good.