Of course it was the sun, the certainty when the first reminder was left wet, a floated kiss I could not grasp within my palms or rescue from memory.
It could have been the photographs, tried, told, as torn as electronic worlds allow.
I can't tell which part is pretending, if the disappointment of dried mango, the dispersal of my recollection, if the yearning is even mine anymore. And where I belong is even more fluid, fought with in moments of frantic recall of being stark, being strong along the trembling, acrobatic line I never named.
Or is it that I am forgetting. Is it that I am replacing? Or reaching for small swaths to bandage the wounds, curls of laughter and crisp if candied knots upon my tongue?
The Hardest Part still haunts me; and with it American Pie. The shadows of trucks and trembling drivers, the traffic where I held my hand, my heart, out to the wind. It just takes two notes and I am knocked back into that past, portly with pretense, but particular in numbing my naivite. Only moments and I am promised fine wine ice cream and an eventual passing of the storms.
I guess, I suppose, in the icing that is nostalgia I must one day accept that such divine delicacies only came with attics and escalation. That, while I miss most my father, I may also miss myself; or us. Or then.
I miss the roast chicken dinners, the crease of smoke, even; I miss make-believing.
And so I've stopped screaming, stopped stomping, stopped complaining. The ease with which I approach my world at once entertains and drastically disappoints. The extreme inevitability of growing up brings sighs where there were once cries, sleep where there was once sprinting. I don't think I somehow feel less, but I have foregone my own avenues in a lull of exhaustion that seems circular and endless and, more than anything, awfully, endlessly, achingly unreal.
