(the first)
We’re sitting in the grass outside of our home and the blades are perking into our soles, you braid daisies in my hair and hum the lyrics to a song half-heard from the old kitchen radio and the memories flitter in firefly gasps.
(the second)
It’s the summer of hiking boots and hunting down pulsating lights in the sky and our bags are packed with butter-sandwiches and sweetly-sugared grapefruit juice in plastic bottles and you smile with the sun between your teeth and I laugh with the clouds behind my eyes.
(the third)
We’re watching the night sky from the roof of our room and your hand grasps mine feverishly when a star burns out and we whisper prayers into the darkness because it’s not beautiful, it’s not holy, it’s the coldest thing we could ever dread to see.
(the fourth)
It’s midnight and we pull the moon into our eyes and the stars into our fingertips and when we sit, drenched by the starlight, we wait until dawn breaks over the horizon and sip hot chocolate from frost-covered fingers.
(the fifth)
We play make-believers, dressed in sheets that we call capes and wave wooden sticks like magic wands, quartz stones like gems our mother bought from the town fair dangle lazily from our necks and we whisper magic into the runes, hushed with lips red from strawberry candies.
(the sixth)
We are dreamers of the night and you string your stories to my heart melodies, wrap them in periwinkle blue powder when your voice whispers of pirates and mermaids and little girls becoming heroes of their own stories and our backyards, snuggled in suburbia, becomes a dark forest at dusk.
(the seventh)
October crinkles in the air and the corner of the sitting room stretches long and haunting with your empty chair while the leaves start to fall and the streets start to blend from orange and green into red and dark and grey and your absence still aches, harshly, at 3 am.
