they say that summer's when you hate yourself. you look down at the valleys between your thighs and the hills making their way across your stomach and let the beach towel drape across your chest instead of on the sand. they say that summer's where you find yourself, in the internships between semesters and the hours spent with your fingers wrapped in a telephone cord, your feet dangling off the edge of the desk. yet i think that summer's where i lose myself. in the time that seems both endless and ending, and the sunrises that i both greet and miss (usually the latter). the ocean is crisp and clear, yet the grass is just as inviting and so is a game football or even a game of "who can eat the most marshmallows" in between swallows of laughter and air. summer's the season of love, emanating from the records in my room to the hot air outside. it doesn't matter what tomorrow means, or when he'll come home (or if he ever will at all). **you are young. you are beautiful. you are the summer. and you've only just begun.

you are five when you discover how much bigger the room becomes when your mother leaves your bedside at night, and ten when science still doesn't explain why. you grow up beside a puppy that cries at your disappearance and welcomes you home with fire-lit eyes every evening. at fifteen, you fall in love with the way shadows look when they're holding hands in the summer. and then, you meet a girl who laughs into silence and measures your smile with her tongue and are confused when she refuses to trail the clouds among your footsteps.

because not all of us grew up that way, thinking that the world was a hurricane that we needed to be anchored against, or a song wasn't complete without a countermelody to wrap around its rough edges. we sat around miniature globes and imagined how the constellations looked in venice. we drew minutes into hours on the backs of our hands, we became our own best thing thing. and each time the sun went down, we'd look past the shadows in the concrete and rejoice in the freedom entwined between our fingers where you were convinced her hands belonged.

i should be able to
leave a word,
                                                                  hanging
off the edge of a page without feeling so very
guilty
about how the lines just
           don't
                      match
                                      up.
or how the spaces between them should be equal
and counted out:
                                 1,
            2,
                                                      37,
infinity.
                i just don't want to be
STUCK
                                        erasing,
                              always
                                            erasing
what i
think
to fit
what i
see.

i wish there was a warning
i could wear around my neck,
the kind you would recognize
from the beakers in your lab.

careful: volatile substance.

maybe then
you wouldn't be so shocked
over my habit to disappear,
my body evaporating into air
and leaving nothing behind
to even let you know
i had ever been there at all.

the sky was dark
and the moon moved
in and out,
in and out
from behind the clouds.

so she and i sat under the windshield,
numbering the stars on our wrists
and wishing reality wouldn't
begin at nineteen
when we opened the car door.

dear body,

please don't get used to sleep.
just admit it.

as nice as it is to settle into
the warm embrace of your thoughts
and rise before the clock counts out,
there is so much you will have missed.

3 a.m with a boy who may
sing you a song or tell you a secret.
you might even cry when it passes from
his lips to your ears in the midnight air
(though you won't exactly know why.)

the fevered attempts to outrun the morning,
your feet fold and slick on the wet grass,
but a haughty laugh keeping the sun at bay
and the chill of the stars off your shoulders.

or even the frantic pitter-patter of keys
as you race the escape of the story
your mind forgot to tell.

so i apologize in advance
for the nodding off during conversation,
the necessity of an extra cappuccino shot,
the added stress of deadlines missed
and the missed alarms waking you to reality.

but after all, my dear,
isn't it those wonder nights that make you
want to be alive in the morning?

the only love affair i've ever had
is with the world in motion.
the permanent state of impermanence
that wakes me every morning
to question the sky above
(something no human has ever done.)

and i'd much sooner heed the call of escape
than the sigh of my name from your lips,
because i know that nothing will ever
look as beautiful as it does
from the window of a moving car
as i fly past it,
for now.

or maybe forever.