this is our story
2004-05-14 & 2:59 a.m.

the bookbag in the picture is more yellow, the girl more naive, the phone cord less tangled. the smiles are still just as wide, but for different reasons, more evolved ones perhaps in a retrospective way. the transitions weigh heavy on my mind, the conversations leave out more because there is so much more to say. it is the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning, the beginning of it all. they come in tomorrow, from a different world, a place i used to know and now love to leave.

the world seems so much larger and smaller all at once, and when the defining moments come, all you want to do is hold your red plastic cup and walk up the stairs to a place where upstairs is a figure of speech. it's the verge of spinning out of control, but you let yourself hold on so you can hug more tightly than you ever thought possible, until the sadness subsides and you notice the start of the summer. there are many all-too-soon's and they come and go so frequently that the only thing you can understand is yourself.

the colored pencils have been long lost; the letters i used to pour over are in some drawer from a desk i haven't used in years; lone eyebrows are raised and you realize you never really gave them a chance. but it all makes its way somehow, to a place that lives partially in the hasty tears, the fingers that brush aside the lone strand of hair, the spot by the river when morning was seven hundred conversations away. and now we may not be able to watch the sun rise all together, but we can at least know we are thinking of everyone. and so perhaps there is no perhaps; this is our spiral; this is our ode. and we all recede until resurface, when we will share more than we even believe in now.