Laughter bubbles from our candy-stained mouths in the musical way that can only be associated with youth.
The sepia-tinted memories pour from the projector screen with fizzles courtesy of late 1999 videography. How young we were,
how naive.
Pudgy stomachs pushed out proud, as circles were run around the sprinklers, around and around and around.
Those were the years before you could afford a big pool swallowing up the whole of your backyard,
before your family moved away.
But our clumsy pink feet held no premonitions,
only the glee of the late afternoon spent with a best friend.
Those were the days spent wrapped in a cocoon of optimism,
where the worst pain was a skinned knee.
Now,
I sit here wondering if your favorite color is still blue,
or if your mom still cuts your hair on the back porch and makes homemade banana bread.
I guess there isn't one reason you and I no longer know each other’s name.
There isn’t one to blame.
But forgive me, for today I wonder what could’ve been.
What if you had been there?
What if I had stayed?
Would laughter still bubble and shriek and tumble
from our mouths like a soda-can shook too many times?
Or would I still be singing this melancholy refrain?
Over time we learned that years of scars leaves no room for new tissue to grow.
But looking back through the past makes you realize that you’d trade a million skinned knees for a chance to hold that laughter again.
It doesn’t matter though, we’d probably still end up here,
less friend than foe.
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