august

You are seven years old on a field of crushed clover, thrusting a palm into the open air and watching a body collapse onto the dirt as if the invisible surge of your own magic forced them down, their angry shouts of un-fair rising up like dust because you won a game of your own making, and your shoes are canvas and threadbare, full of holes and memories your parents paid for, but your lungs are full of the damp, green scent of earth and the grit at the back of your throat from rolling down the hill, feeling immortal, believing the afternoon would stretch forever and that every day would end with grazed knees and friends within shouting distance, and you spend years waiting on the end of a month, desperate for eighteen and aching for twenty-one, romanticizing the quiet glory of getting into a car and going anywhere by yourself, dreaming of the day you could buy your own liquor and drink until the night blurred, never understanding that the freedom to go places alone becomes the habit of always being alone, that distance slowly swallows your friends into quiet blue bubbles on a screen, that the world’s vivid hues drain out until the sky is just a dull, bleached grey, and suddenly you are in your twenties—a number people call young, though the youth has been stripped clean out of it—because there is no play left, and there’s bills to pay at the beginning of each month, and the phantom powers you held at seven have rotted into a terrifying loss of control, where the only magic remaining is how fast a month disappears, and now you walk into stores to buy your own shoes just to tread water, and you blink once, twice, and find yourself on the bathroom floor of your apartment, cheap wine searing the back of your tongue, snot and salt wet against your lip because you’ve spent hours calculating the weight of standing up and decided against it, but if you close your eyes just enough, the harsh fluorescent overheads blur into the pale wash of an August sky, and the bite of the ceramic tile beneath your cheek stops feeling cold and starts to feel like the cool, damp earth after running until your chest burned, the silence in the room softening into that same suspended, motionless moment on the field when the world briefly paused and you were everything and anything you thought to be, and so you fold a towel beneath your head, letting the world spin without you for a few quiet seconds, remembering that even in all this mess, you will never be this young again, and for one breath, you decide to just lay still and savor it.