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.