1

We eat when our bellies run empty, watch the trains blow by when we want to feel a breeze, nap as carelessly as babies when we’re weary. We take our time like it’s unlimited. There is no such thing as waste in our world. We rinse off in the cool spring after sweaty bike rides and suck water out of vases like we’re wild daisies. No other glass is tall enough to subside the dryness at the back of our throats.

We drive wherever the road takes us with your hand peeking through the sunroof like a groundhog; Mine makes cool blue waves out of the passenger’s side window. When I make faces at passing cars, you tell me I’ll get killed one of these days by a grumpy man with road rage, but I just laugh and keep singing. You’re the one driving, and there isn’t a thing that could taint this moment.

The sun brings out the best in me. She wipes my lazy eyes and shows me how to cherish the day. She tells me secrets using morse code. Obnoxiously, she beats down on me when I deserve to be beaten down on. I told you that a part of me resents her, but you didn’t believe me. Neither did I.

If we don’t feel like doing much of anything in the morning, we sleep in until the sun is too irresistible to sleep through. She shines in through my too-transparent curtains and highlights my favorite imperfections on your skin. I stare for a moment too long at your resting figure, cloaked by linen, and then I’ll stretch the sleep away and sip from the vase. 

In the dusky evening, we go to a place I’ve passed by a hundred times but have never stopped to admire. The pond, the clouds, the hum of the bugs. I learn to appreciate every little thing, and I know you do, too. We fall silent while you doodle a creature on the back of a receipt. I pluck and strum my out-of-tune strings. Hum along, if you want. Hum along.

We dilly and dally all afternoon and you get sunburnt and I laugh about how the sun seems to favor me. You argue that sunburn is a token of love. I argue that the word for the sun’s love is sunkissed, not sunburned. I win the battle and you win a tub of aloe vera.

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The sun blinks off, and night comes soon enough, but we’re still outside with the fireflies and birds and frogs. Your burn doesn’t bother you so much in the cool night air. The mosquitos hardly nip at us anymore. They’ve grown used to our presence (our blood is old news). You hum your tunes like you do and I study the stars like I do. There, in the sweet envelope of the night, I am a blink away from falling asleep.
 

Cicadas a-chirping. Frogs a-croaking. You a-humming. I swear, I’ll live in this moment for as long as you let me.

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2

Don’t think I forgot about those chilly city nights. In my mind, we still climb the fences we were made to climb. We rub blisters on our heels with beat up rubber shoes and too-thin socks. Change falls out of our pockets as we run. There goes a dime, a quarter, a few pennies: money I don’t want back. A donation. Unfamiliar hands and feet, running down an unfamiliar street. I felt like I’d known these steps all my life.

We walk wherever the sidewalk takes us. We pass by a hundred souls and a hundred more shops. We wander through several busy blocks, sharing stories of our sisters and our hometowns, before my denim-clad backside finds its way to a cold, concrete fence. From up there, I am taller than you. Your nose turns pink in the chilly night. Music seeps from the speakers of a party van at the red light. I stand tall, you look up, and we dance.

I don’t know what kind of world I was expecting to visit, (you asked after the van went by- am I what you thought I was?- and I should’ve laughed at you for asking such a question) but I was exhilarated by what I found. The stars in your city are man-made. They reflect off of the pavement in a disco-ball fashion and the constellations they make are incalculable. There are always people to observe, always people to observe us, and yet, I wasn’t worried about being seen. The people- walking or talking or shouting or driving- they reminded me of ants, the way they all looked like they knew where they were going.
(You exceeded my expectations. For the record.)

The cards we were dealt didn’t align with the game we wanted to play. Yet, we played. We begged bouncers to let us in, pleaded on our knees, but they wouldn’t give us a break. Nobody did, really. So, we made our own break. 

Escapades in elevators and stolen hearts in stairwells. I dropped pieces of me on the concrete floor that I never bothered to pick up. A pair of hands in one pocket, two bodies on one bench, a couple of silver rings bedazzled our indigo-painted fingers. Hangnails scraped gentle circles on the heel of my hand. I’d like to claim and hoard these memories- keep them hidden in a lockbox- but they’re yours, too. 

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I boarded the train two stops after you did, yet we picked the same car. Think of it this way: 10 cars packed full of 700 strangers. The doorways are blocked with bodies, you can’t travel through the cars. We’re packed like sardines. It’s a busy hour. I’m reluctantly prepared to wait twenty more long minutes to see you, but out of the corner of my eye, here you are. A glimpse of that hair, those pants, the fur around your neck; Here you are.

Think of it this way: 10 cars packed full of 699 strangers. The doorways are blocked by warm bodies, so as not to let the cold in. We’re sitting by a man and his two young daughters. They’re giggling. They’re going home. We talked about God. We talked about mothers. Fifteen minutes couldn’t have felt any shorter. There is so much to tell, so much to hear, and only five stops left.

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3

Sometimes, I think about the day that we were stuck in the tree. It was all well until you came across branches that wouldn’t hold you and climbed onto them anyway. I followed your lead.

Up there, I felt like an orange cat, waiting for a big red truck to roll into the park, (wheels screeching to a stop, a sturdy ladder carrying a fireman that looked more like an angel, his gloves around my orange abdomen, too thick to feel the warmth of his hands) waiting for someone to save me.

At the same time, I never wanted to come down. While imagining a life in the willow tree, cloaked by its wilty branches, the distance from the ground became less daunting. It’s peculiar, the way I can’t seem to remember a word we said that day, but the memory of the ants marching along the crackled bark is clearer than the spring we filled our vase in afterward. 

I wondered where they were going.

I thought, for a moment, that they might be as lost as you were driving to the park that day, (Though, that wasn’t really your fault. I’m a bad navigator. The maps are too big and have too many roads that overlap and fork and twist and turn. Plus, our conversation, though I haven’t the slightest idea what it was, distracted me from following something as tangible as a map).

Then, I knew that the thought about ants being lost was a foolish one. Ants are born with a mysterious intuition that you and I lack. We were in that tree for a very different reason. We wanted to climb and feel tall and mighty. We wanted to feel the bark beneath our palms and rub calluses onto the softest parts of our hands. We wanted the leaves to start singing to us. We wanted to see how high we could ascend without snapping a limb (Yours, mine, the tree’s- it’s all the same in the end). 
They were on a mission.

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4

I’ve turned into the groundhog, and it seems like I’ve entered another dimension. There are no vases filled with sweet water. No city stars creating city constellations. No intelligent ants, no firemen to save me, no musical vans. The lack of all of these things could’ve depressed me into predicting a late spring. A long and cold winter. Instead, I shrugged and gave the people what they wanted. I knew you were among them, awaiting the moment my whiskers would begin to peek out of the ground. I knew you wanted those beardtongues to bloom. An early spring was the least I could do.

Many moments (the coins, the train, the mosquitoes, the humming) have faded into something I rely on photos and scraps of memory to recall. But, the sweetest memories reside on the backs of restaurant receipts, hidden in my wallet to this day.
Don’t get it twisted, boy; It’s not as if I’ll die of a broken heart. It’s not as if I will yearn for young summers and tragic winters for decades. I just don’t understand how something, once so familiar to me, could become buried so deeply that I have to dig a grave to find it again. I want to stop imagining. I want to experience it all again.

Time, I’ve found, is more restrictive than we made it out to be.