Sixteen Summers

I tried to write poems in my head all week but all I could think of was trampolines and being sixteen, the summer I jumped in the pool with all my clothes on and never quite rose to the surface. Every important thing happened in someone’s backyard or basement. Everything changes, poems scribbled on napkins are now long conversations screamed under our breath until six in the morning, days dizzy from sleeplessness. We pretend this is still a game we designed to last forever and we’re so good at pretending we forget to grow up, we’ve forgotten whose turn comes next so we sip on time and it slips away as we slip into altered states of consciousness, trying on new personas, believing for just one night we might wake up underneath the stars again. We’ll forget that we warned ourselves, we told ourselves to slow down but deep down we knew—nobody listens to the voice inside their head, nobody listens to reason when reason is a siren and impulse is a song turned up so loud the floorboards shake and it’s not too late to retrace your steps back to summer in the air, to smell the imaginary ocean from a hotel bed, but instead we paint pictures only we can see and call it accidental. We are living the same day over and over til we shrug our shoulders and stop counting the days it’s been since we felt something worth filling up blank spaces with.