I had a wonderful post percolating in my head for days-a post about those blue skies in late June, those same blue skies you said good-bye to your childhood under, the same blue skies you left home with, packed your things, spent a last few days quietly with friends, not thinking ahead with sadness but with excitement.
I spent the last little while thinking about this post, thinking about my own ambivalence when high school ended, my hidden fears, manifested by tension headaches my entire last semester and compounded by falling in love. I was terrified, sad and excited all at once.
My friend and I would walk our small town streets at night, and walk to the top of the single overpass in town, staring out across the river, pretending the equally small American town was actually a city, Montreal, Toronto, that place where our lives could begin. We’d sigh and keep walking, waiting for sunrise.
We assumed we’d always be friends. It was implied that we’d always be there for each other as she watched me leave town without a backward glance. It was assumed that the lovely day in the park that last June, with the apple blossoms dancing on the soft kissing breeze in the sunlight, balanced against the glass like sky would not be the last, that we could continue those halcyon days, those precious, simple, slowed days where time is like taffy and we only pull at the very edges, the insides staying heated and full.
We were rich then, and we didn’t know. It wasn’t a perfect time-our edges stuffed with shitty home lives, the navigation of other fucked up teenagers, the fear and absolute confusion we felt at our futures. But we were rich with each other, our small group of friends, piled on each other in a park, high as kites, imagining UFO’s as we scared our selves silly. We we rich with those sunrises we talked until, satiating our minds and eyes on a quiet fire that still burns. We talked and laughed and ate and lived. No more, no less. We were pure in ourselves, even if the world around us felt like crumbling.
I’ve had this post in my head because there have been days where again the sunlight, the blue forever brings to mind that wild exultation that living in your future can’t bring. The possibility we lose growing up, having responsible lives. The clarity we once had, even in our wild states.
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It’s raining here today, as it has for days. The kind of rain that makes you wonder where the magic disappears to, and then you wander out into your yard and stumble upon wild strawberries growing with abandon. Not all are nibbled by slugs, and in the rock hard rain, they’re the sweetest bit of wonder you’ve had in quite a long time.
They do indeed taste good to her.
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