Happy Sunday. I’ve spent the weekend inhaling Lana Del Rey’s new album while watercoloring a scene of Hell for my “literary underworlds” course. Dangerous and wonderful combination. I also went to little vintage pop-up sale in South Park that felt like a bite of Brooklyn in my own backyard. Where else can you drink eight dollar lavender lattes while browsing vinyl? Sidewalk book boxes? Ceramic stores? Brilliant.

But anyway. Here is some Sunday morning stream of consciousness.

Candy-colored poppies are springing up under my feet and over my head. They are falling into my bed sheets like secrets that the earth has been keeping all winter. I’m finding little red petals in my shower drain and on my towels and all over the sidewalk and each one is telling me a different story of the past. They are staining my fingertips and the bottoms of my feet bright red. Blood red. The kind of red that can only mark death, birth, or the loss of innocence. One is always bound up in the other. And every March I find that it does all three.

There’s always been something startling about spring to me, something aggressive and abrupt about this much beauty and life suddenly appearing all around me. It seems to happen overnight. You never see it coming. The air simply feels a way one morning that it did not the previous one and with that subtle change comes a whole avalanche of new memories that have been lying dormant all winter. They are awake in me now. They are taking me by the hand and walking me through it all again. This day, all those years ago, again. And with each step my hands reveal more stains. When I open them, candy-red petals fall to my feet like drops of the past finally going away from me.

I crane my neck from the petal covered floors to blank blue sky and dream of the future while simultaneously wading through the tenderness that lives in the past. It’s a strange feeling when memories that once cut like a hot knife begin to feel more like honey drizzling on your skin—warm, amber-colored, and sticky enough to trap you inside of them if you come too close.

Like how it was springtime when a boy kissed me for the first time. And how I think you lose more innocence with that first kiss than you do with anything else because you just never see it coming. You are a kid one minute and then you are learning things left and right and I don’t think you ever stop learning things from that moment onward. I haven’t. I have been learning things about this world ever since that first kiss that I could never have begun to understand without it.

But I’m planting red poppies in the garden now and innocence feels like it was a lot longer ago than it really was. And I’m drinking water now because I can’t stand the taste of vodka anymore. I don’t think we could have liked it back then either, but things were different then. We were different. This world did not exist. We lived in one that was entirely our own. But now, it’s that world that has gone away from us. You never can have both. So I drink water now. I like to keep a clear head now. I feel so much older than I am. I wash my hair and wring it out in the moonlight. I comb each strand and feel candy-red poppies under my feet.

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