I want to go back and redo high school with you and talk less about school and less about my anxieties and more about the way the rain sounds and how the universe is and the way your eyes squeeze when you’re genuinely smiling as opposed to being sarcastic. I would have loved to have made your eyes squeeze like that more than I made them wide with half-hidden concern. I want to go back to the person I was and tell her that grades and tests and rules aren’t real but that you sure are, that time isn’t as expansive as she thinks it to be so she should make your house her second home and learn the pattern of your mothers laugh by heart and speak to you like a free waterfall of who she is and expect nothing less from you while you’re still there with her. Her time where she is is fleeting, so she really ought to be spending more of it with you and less of it worrying endlessly about things that will eventually stop making sense. I want to go and relive those four years like they should have been lived: like they mattered. Nothing ever mattered more than you.