August.

Hot and sticky and filled with a sense of finality. I don’t even know where to start with you.

STRETCHING TIME

Summer is ending. The days are slowly, nearly imperceptibly, growing shorter, darker. There is something in the air that promises a thing I have never known—fall. Time is falling through my fingers like water and there are so many moments where I wish it fell more like honey. Molasses. Thick, maple syrup. Something that would drip slowly and sweetly. Something so sticky that it would take forever to go anywhere fast. It would linger, last, and stretch itself out like cherry taffy.

Time isn’t like that, but with you I find myself wishing, all the time, that it was.

I am running around Grand Central Station and all I see are clocks. Their numbers spin around and around and I don’t think my feet are touching the ground. I have never wanted time to stop more. Just for a moment. Just for this moment. I would slice through the continuum of space just to crawl inside of this second and feel it entirely, over and over again. The wind, the tunnel, the swiftness of the train as it shoots out into a place that is not this one. I turn on my heels and walk up the steps, noticing the faces of everyone around me and how strange it is that they know nothing of what I am feeling in this moment. Or maybe they do. Maybe they too have found home in another. Maybe they know the lethal, ungodly things that that does to a person.

How entirely and irrevocably changed the world feels.

A BOX OF COLORS

Speaking of the world and how it changes, I have been thinking so strangely and vividly about the first world I knew. The one with daffodils and my mother’s rose garden and sunsets that bled all over my open hands. Blue, blue skies and endless stretches of bubblegum pink sidewalks. They burned my feet all summer long and I never loved anything more.

I used to sit in the grass and point my toes to the sky and dream of a world that I had no name for yet. There were fresh strawberries in my hands and my mother was making pasta sauce. If I close my eyes, I can still smell the onions sizzling in the pan. Garlic and basil are wafting out of the open windows and circling around my head, enveloping me in something I didn’t know was love. I breathed it in, I consumed it. It became a part of me.

You don’t realize a thing like that until so much later. How intricately your first experiences of the world weave their way into your perception of it for years to come. You are given a box of colors as a child and you use those hues to color in your life. You know canary red and banana yellow and then you go off and you meet other people and they all have their own colors.

There has never been something as beautiful as the mingling of those perceptions.

Let my colors bleed into yours. Spill your visions all over mine. Let life become a Pollock painting. Every line, a person. Every intersection, a connection.

When I was a kid, they put a piece of paper at the bottom of a cardboard box and poured paint on top. They dropped a marble inside and told us to shake it from side to side. I remember shaking that box like my life depended on it and being so thrilled by the mess. My eyes grew large as the blank sheet grew increasingly stained by random collisions of color. I thought it looked how life felt.

I still do.

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