shades of blue

be patient with me i'm learning html and losing my mind.

essays:

something something sabrina carpenter

not essays:

poseidon's stupid horses
heimholtz resonance
when it rains it pours

cicada drone and pale pink clouds fingerpainted into the sky above your house.

there’s something about this last summer.

squinting into the faded blue above your neighbor’s gum tree you see hundreds of little birds. black pinpricks so small at first you think they’re dragonflies a hundred feet above the earth.

a man in a white shirt with a delivery bag is dancing down the sidewalk. a little girl is crying. and the sky fades to white and to yellow. the pale pink clouds to blue and then purple. it happens in an instant. and there’s just something you can’t place.

the edges of the gum tree’s leaves are backlit by the last of the setting sun.

you’re twenty eight years old and something in you misses something you can’t name. something slower than this; sleeping in and having it feel meaningless. sinking into soft sand and the way it feels when a warm breeze lifts your hair off the back of your neck. seaweed wrapped around your arms shaken off into the basin of a tiny sailboat. being alone in deep brackish water.

three kittens wrestle in your garden every morning and you watch with your chin on your knees breathing in the air kept sweet by the crook of your arm. you used to hate looking out your backdoor. the yellow light thrown off by winter’s sickly clouds late into the night used to drive you crazy.

you call this summer one for the books. charmed and ringed in rose-colored light. sunshine shatters on your bathroom wall and it’s like something else, far away. a condo clubhouse. a framed watercolor painting of a mallard duck. the smell of chlorine and wallpaper glue. dust suspended in thick, still air. somewhere you lived for months after what happened. shampoo and water bugs in the big pool. somewhere that doesn’t exist anymore.

cicada drone and blue, endless sky. writing a letter to your best friend on pink paper burning the fronts of your calves on the pavement of your childhood driveway. inside, an email to your penpal is pulled up on your family computer. you’ve signed off by saying i have to go play outside now!