Old sneakers are abandoned on the shore, laces pulled from their holes with impatience and anger alike. They've been tossed aside and left where they lay, socks join them just as quickly. They are the first thing they spot in the familiar grass before anything else. They can see out past the beginning of the waters to where you are waist deep and waiting.
[break][break]
You stand there, with the sun beating down on your shoulders, ruffling your hair and coaxing the flower on your shoulder to turn skyward.
[break][break]
Someone yells out their concerns, like they think you're going to do something stupid. Like it's going to happen again just because you're out here in the water but you see it differently now. You see it for what it was. Mistakes happen.[break][break]
Bare feet sink into the mud and clay bellow your skin, toes wiggle through the water and find their way back to shore but you refuse to come out of the water. It's not one hand this time it's two, fingers spread and waiting, insisting, for anyone to take the bait. You insist and insist until you can't take it anymore. You reach for their hands and you pull them in.
[break][break]
Two at a time, pairs to steady each other, friends to keep each other from falling in the mud bellow. Some of them you don't have to pull in, the ones that already teetered on the edge, just needed a push come in of their own accord and before long every last one of you is in the waters again.
[break][break]
Just like old times.
[break][break]
It's not quite the same, but you quiet the angers of the only one willing to yell at you. Not a one of you blames them for the outburst, no you do what they need most and you hold them close. You hold them until it's okay to let them go again, another hand on their shoulder keeps them steady.
[break][break]
Nothing can go back to the way it was before, but moments later there is laughter amongst the tears. Someone splashes another and the waves of water are sloshing back and forth in an instant.
[break][break]
For just a second, there is hope in the hot summer air again. There is laughter in your small group, and a lively glow in their eyes.
[break][break]
And the moss covered rock is peppered with flowers again, small blooming buds filled with magic.

You're the only one that looks any of them in the eye. You're the only one that doesn't distract yourself with the ground, that insists on looking up across the table at the others. You insist they do the same, you insist that you all face it head on instead of continuing to dance around the subject like you have been. It's the only way you could ever be friends again, isn't it?
[break][break]
Not a one of them will look at you over the table. You feel bad for the waitress who awkwardly takes your orders. It's like she can tell what is wrong even though you know she probably can't but you can't stop thinking it's right there on every one of your face's.
[break][break]
The empty chair doesn't help, the one he always used to sit in.
[break][break]
You leave it open for old time's sake.
[break][break]
Small talk is barely there, a couple of the others seem to loosen up after the meal arrives but it's still not the same. Someone asks how you can be so okay with it, none of them seem to understand that you aren't, that you won't ever be. You couldn't be.
[break][break]
A star whispers (whispered) something in your ear, it reminded you of how things were. How they could have been, what they would have been had things not changed that day. That is why you sit here with so much vigor, so much energy, so much determination.
[break][break]
Because you were but a moss covered rock, settled into the shore with no intention of moving. You weren't meant to ever touch the water, you didn't know how badly you needed it. You didn't realize until years later how it made the flowers grow, how the light of their smiles brought them to bloom. It wasn't until they all closed for good when that light left you that you realized what had happened.

[break][break]
Perhaps that is the reason you are the first to rise from the table, because you are done with moping. You are done with silence. You are done with all the things you had left behind, all the things none of you had ever been when you were together. You stand, nodding at your old friends, at the glances they give you. You hold the gazes of those willing to look at you and you tell them where they can find you for the rest of the day.
[break][break]
You'll be at the lake. Where it all began that sweet summer day. Where it all ended as the seasons began to change. Where you want it all to begin again. Where you want them all to be renewed.
[break][break]
A hand is held out over the table, fingers spread for them all to see. It shakes, it insists, and when no one grabs it it clenches into a fist and turns to leave.

Pure. Untouched.

[break][break]

The silence of the night envelopes you, coating you in something you can't quite describe. A quiet that is deafening, a silence that roars in your ears. There is nothing and it makes you hear everything. The rustle of the grass by your ear when the wind blows through the hillside, the rattling of the trees above you, in the distance an owl says hello.
[break][break]
It's like the world is screaming at you.
[break][break]
Every noise feels a little bit louder than the last.
[break][break]
The crescendo seems never ending, as if the world seeks to crush you beneath the sound, seeks to destroy you beneath the weight of life that has so many less troubles than your own. Just as you think your heart could not race faster in your chest, your breath quickening until it's sure to catch in your throat and suffocate you-
[break][break]
Everything is quiet again.
[break][break]
And you lay there in the meadow thinking about the world and how it works. The cruelty that is the passage of time, the magic that is in flower petals and luminescent smiles. How it had you so enchanted, so enthralled, thinking that the world could be good and worth it, that perhaps you could be the thing you wanted most of all one day. How you were almost there.
[break][break]
It crumbles around you, like stars falling out of the sky. Those precious smiles begin to fade with each piece of light that tumbles down from the sky until they fill the grass you lay in. They come on waves of sound that make your ears hurt thinking about it too hard. They settle into silence that makes you feel like your bones should break any moment now. There is no hand in your face to save you this time. There is nothing but your own mind.
[break][break]
Each star holds something, something you don't want to hear but they tell it to you anyway. The voices start out small, quiet, barely there in the night sky. Then louder and louder, telling you all the things you have tried so hard to forget, all the little notions you no longer wish to fill your head with. Small pleasantries, happiness and tears, whispering a world's worth of things in your ear. They speak until you cover your ears and roll to bury your face in the grass. Anything to keep them from making you hear it.
[break][break]
You are so focused on keeping back the tears you almost miss how quiet it gets when they finally relent. The world grows quiet again and now even the owl is gone, the wind still. There is nothing in the night to distract you but your own breathing, your own heartbeat.
[break][break]
After awhile you stand. It's a slow motion, as if you are unsure, half expecting the world to knock you back into the grass again. The stars are gone, no longer laying in wait for you to let them in. They have returned to the sky where they belong. You breath deep.
[break][break]
When you return,[break]
City streets seem so loud, and yet so quiet too.

Fingers trace across broken glass, seeking the worn face now hidden beneath the sprawling cracks. They reach out like a spider's web, radiating from the far corner, branching out like long thin fingers to find him. To take him from you. Just as everything else has.

[break][break]

You set down the frame, delicate, careful, gentle fingers hesitant to let it go. Letting go of this feels like letting go of him and once you start you won't be able to stop. First him, then them, then everything will get caught in the spiders web and you will be left with nothing. Nothing but empty cobwebs in your head.

[break][break]
And yet. And yet.
[break]
You do.
[break][break]
It falls with a clank and thud, the frame crumbles against the floor of your room. The pieces falls haphazardly in every direction and you pay them no further attention as you turn away and walk across the room. There is another on the other side, of all the smiling face that used to stare at you with such warmth. The same ones that now look at each other with anxiety in their eyes when you are all together. You can't even pretend anymore, none of you can.
[break][break]
Who can blame you? It is your first summer broken, missing a piece that was so large and important none of you could ever possibly be whole again could you? It's like taking away a piece of yourself and hoping, wishing, somehow against all odds that there might be a way to fill in a gap you never even knew might need be filled one day. It can't be, you're not sure you want it to be.
[break][break]
And yet you stand here, eyes scanning over the pictures that line your wall and thinking about that smile that had made you more than a stone. That warmth that had made you feel like something other than what you are so convinced you are and you wonder. What could this emptiness mean, this one so different from the one you know. This one filled with everything but vacant of anything notable. You wish you know, you wish there was someone to ask, an answer that could make you feel like you were something more than an empty house full of cobwebs.
[break][break]
One by one you pluck the memories down from the wall, you breath deep as you line them up together, making a neat and perfect pile. You take your time, making sure each one if perfectly in place with the next, each one in order of when and where it happened. You look through the faces, glowing smiles and laughter ringing in your ears now just as much as they had when the memory was made.
[break][break]
The trash bin is already full of little notions, notes written in class when you should have been paying attention, doodles and pictures making fun of each other that had been passed around and laughed at. At first you hesitate, the perfectly placed bundle stays in your hand, lifted over your shoulder and you close your eyes. You have to be certain, you can't go back when this is all done.
[break][break]
They flutter over the paper filled can, but not all of them make it in. You don't pay attention, you've already moved along to the next place that the memories lay, filling in space. You keep going and going. [break][break]

You spot him on the other side of the pond, face clear as the sweet spring day draped behind him. It's almost like nothing has changed even though everything has. It was inevitable. You couldn't all stay that way forever, that was nothing more than the sweet notions of younger days. The idea you would all be friends forever.
[break][break]
And then it happened, and everything changed.
[break]
You all changed.
[break]
None of you could do anything to stop it.
[break][break]

And perhaps,[break]
In many ways
[break]
It was better this way, you think. And you know that you are alone in it. No one but you seemed to think that if you could all allow such a thing to happen then maybe you should part ways. Some thought it out of your hands, some thought you all could have done more than you did. Some didn't want to think about it at all.
[break][break]
You see him as clearly as the day you had first met. That sweet summer day, the sun overhead and they all glowed so brightly then. He especially, with his hand stretched out to you. He didn't know it then, how dull you had been beneath their presence. He couldn't have possibly seen what lay beneath the moss. All he saw was a vibrant green waiting for someone to water the seeds on its surface.
[break][break]
The tears on your face no longer have anything to water.
[break][break]
The flowers are dead.
[break][break]
Just like he and you.
[break][break]
Maybe that's what makes it so easy to step off the bank, to walk out into the water. You can't really feel how your shoes fill with water, soaking through your socks to your skin to your bone. It settle there beneath your feet for a moment as you watch and you think to yourself. How could any of you let this be?[break][break]
It's like ice creeping up your skin, seeking your veins, chilling you to your core. It fills you with something you've never felt before. Lost, happiness, laughter, jealousy, sadness, disdain- none of these are the right thing. Not even your precious emptiness that had kept you company for so many years, that is not what lurks over your shoulder now. It is something so entirely different and new that takes you over as you step further into the lake. The water is at your hips now, you can't go much further before you'll be lost to it, to yourself, to the world around you.
[break][break]
The trees are caving in when he turns to you but there is no face for you to see, there is no smile for you to smile back at, no cue to be happy. No sign of warm days ahead. No hidden truth or tantalizing enchantment. The canopy folds in around the lake, reaching further and further from shore, seeking the wet cold skin that carries you out into the center of the lake. You step wrong, almost tumble into the deepest parts and as he turns away from your the trees begin to rustle with something eerily familiar.
[break][break]
Thunder quakes, rattling the sky and the bowing trees as their leaves brush against your skin. It comes in waves of grey clouds turning to black smoke that seeks to fill your lungs and consumes you. You know it will, it has tried before, taking the noise of your heart and drowning it. Tonight it will take it and place it at the bottom of the lake where you will never reach it again if you let you. Feet stick in mud that clings to your shoes and seeks to steal them off of you if they cannot keep you there watching your king turn and forsake you. You are left with only the treetops to hold you above the surface of the water and you feet sink further in. The weight of stone fills your body, the weight of a world you cannot have damns you.
[break][break]
You will not let it steal you.
[break][break]
Small hands reach for the trees, grabbing leaves and branch with reckless abandon until they find purchase in the harsh feel of bark. You flinch as the thunder roars, seeking your chest only to find your heart roaring back, the same deafening sounds you hear so often in your dreams. They seek to eat away at each other until there will be nothing left of either.
[break][break]
Muscles tense, lungs fill with a breath so deep you think it might burst you open, filled with the energy of the rolling thunder.
[break][break]
Both will be denied the right as you pull yourself to shore against the weight in your feet, creeping up your legs, turning you into stone. Your feet fail you, they do not wish to move and you will them to anyway. You must, they must, you cannot stay here where it can reach you like this. You won't let it.
[break][break]
And when finally, your feet step back onto the shore there are no stones in your shoes. They are light as a feather. They move under you with a swiftness unlike before, seeking the shelter beneath the trees as they defy the rumble above. The straighten, the strength of you seeping through the soil to them until their canopy reaches for the sky to drown out the rain and the thunder. The muffle it until it is almost nothing and you breath fast and hard, eyes turning toward a near black sky.
[break][break]

The frozen treat sits in a little paper cup, half melted and abandoned beneath the old oak tree in the middle of the park.
[break][break]
Another sits not quite in a garbage bin, teetering on the edge and waiting for a summer wind strong enough to blow it one way or another.
[break][break]
Somewhere in the sand pit a small child has found a wayward cup to use to make sand castles and almost-domes for his little toy soldiers to play in. He picks it up and packs it full of sand again, unbothered by the sticky nature of its former contents and how the sand sticks to it when it tries to leave.
[break][break]
The swings are full of laughter, children pushing each other, others climbing the swing set and challenging each other to get to the very top. Sticky fingers cling to the metal, seeking to go higher and higher somehow.
[break][break]
one of them makes it to the top of the swing set before anyone else. They sit along the yellow painted bar, feet swinging back and forth in the dimming summer light. The air is changing as they youngest of them ooh and aah at the sight of one of the big kids sitting well above them. The other's seem impressed someone has managed to make it to the top so fast.
[break][break]
It is only the call of an adult seeking one of the youngest that breaks up the pack, sending the group scattering to the wind when the inevitable scolding comes next. They all know they should not climb to the top most bar on the swing set, it is dangerous, there is nothing to catch them if they fall. It does not stop giggling faces from seeking trees and young ones from snickering from behind their mother's and father's legs at the one being scolded.
[break][break]
Hands reach for discarded remnants, seeking to return them from where they came or dispose of them as the crowds begin to thin. The summer air chills as the sun sets over the house tops and the blade of grass beneath bare feet no longer carry the warmth of a late summer day. Even begins to settle over the park as the stragglers behind to find their way to the sidewalk.

[break][break]

All smiles. Cheer in their eyes and the way they carry themselves. Like people that have been filled with fire and warmth and something that sparkles. It's not quite light in your eyes but it's something almost like it. Luminescent. Like they glow from somewhere beneath their skin.
[break][break]
It's almost enchanting, watching them all from your little perch. You can't help but wonder how they do it, how they hold up for so long. Is it well crafted illusions or a reality you cannot find? Something from a different space and time than you are used to. One that only people like them can reach while you are left to watch them and wonder.
[break][break]
It must be, surely, for no matter how many times you delve in deep to find it within yourself you never can. There is no glow to be found, nothing but moss crawling across your flesh and dulling whatever sheen might be hidden beneath it. You curl into yourself, from your little perch at the edge of the waters. You find yourself content to be one of many rocks on the bank, watching the others as they tread farther and farther away from you.
[break][break]
And then
[break][break]
There is, a hand in your face?
[break][break]
Fingers spread out wide like it's waiting for something and at first you just stare at it. Unsure of what to make of the gesture. Dark eyes follow the line of their arm that leads up to their face. You see someone like the others, the glow brighter than any you have seen before when they smile at you. It's hard to look at them, it's hard to watch as they shake their hand at you, like they're insisting on something you don't quite understand.
[break][break]
Surely it can't be meant for you, can it?
[break][break]
Eyes look out past this glowing face, curious as to what could possibly be the point of this. They insist again, like they can't imagine the moss covered rock that you are should be left alone at the water's edge where you belong. Before long they reach out and grab your hand, pulling you from your little perch and out into the water. The plodding of your feet is like sinking rocks trying to find the bottom of the lake and for a moment you almost panic at the idea of it. The thought that perhaps that will become your new perch, a permanent and lifeless one. Perfect for a rock like yourself.
[break][break]
A foreign hand keeps you steady, keeps you from sinking into muddy depths. There's a moment of clarity when the world is nothing but the bright blue of the sky and you're enchanted by it. Like the world had been holding out on you, and perhaps it had been. Waiting for just this moment, when someone glowing and bright was guiding you out into the rest of the stars in the pond. You settle amongst them, even though you feel you don't belong, turning back to the hand that had brought you this far out when you feel too lost in the light.
[break][break]
They only smile at you, and you smile back.


[break][break]

They pepper the green of the field with a vibrancy that seems almost too much now. Too over bearing. Like you might drown in the color if you're not careful. So bold and brazen, taking ownership of the field in front of you like it couldn't possibly belong to anyone but them.
[break][break]
In truth it could not, after all it is the wilderness that really owns this place, it is the flowers that sneak between blades of grass and stake their claim with their roots in the soil. They reach out further and further with each and every day, seeking to take over the dirt and the green in tandem. How could you or man or anything possibly compare?
[break][break]
You can't, of that you are quite certain.
[break][break]
Soft and delicate hands reach out to pluck the bud from the stem. The gesture is done gently, so as not to damage the rest of the flower. Carefully, so as to keep the petals intact. You hold the flower in your hands, dark eyes gazing down at it with a feeling you can't quite put a name to. It's not quite sad, it's not disdain, it's not even the envy or jealousy you had experienced in passing days.
[break][break]
No, this could only be one thing.
[break]
Emptiness.
[break][break]
Carefully, one by one, piece by piece, you pull the bud in your hand apart. You pluck the petals until they sit in a line down you criss-crossed leg. You keep pulling until the other is equally coated, acquiring another as you need them until you're covered in the pretty little petals you so wish you could be. Something people would want to pluck, something the wind would want to pick up and run away with. Something that could be used to adorn houses and braids and tucked behind ears to make people smile.
[break][break]
Something other than you are.
[break][break]
When you are done you sit and stare at the pretty colors across your legs. You think on how you wish they could become a part of you like a bug that makes itself look like a flower disguise itself or like something else might lure in prey. You wouldn't lure in prey, you don't know what you would even lure in but the idea of it is worth thinking about. If only you could.
[break][break]
Previously gentle fingers give care away in exchange for furious action, piecing the petals back together into a bundle in your loosely held fist. You hold them in that hand as you stand, determined not to crush the color you want for yourself. Your hands meet in front of you as you walk back the way you came, cradling the delicate petals on your way back.
[break][break]
Distracted feet seem to think little of the lilacs, hurried knees have no attention to give to the lilies that brush against your skin in the early spring air. The only thing on your mind is the wild petals in your hand, the magic they hold, how it is slowly infecting your mind like a parasite with an idea, with a single thought until it over takes everything.
[break][break]

Thunder fills the sky.
[break][break]
Fills your lungs.
[break][break]
Threatens to flatten your chest beneath its deafening roar.
[break][break]
You can feel it in the air around you, the crackling energy as the storm begins to build over head. The sky looms over you filled with clouds colored in charcoal, smudged across the bright blue it had been earlier in the day. The contrast of morning to now is fresh in your mind. How the sun bore down through white smoke clouds onto a vibrant green filled with the color of every flower that could be grown.
[break][break]
Everything had felt so alive and you had felt so very dead inside. Watching the world with a silent envy, with a blooming jealousy. Unfolding in your hands like the opening petals of the flowers when morning begins to break through the night sky.
[break][break]
Not now.
[break][break]
Now you stand in the middle of the dulling world. Life sways with the growing wind. Flowers bow to the rumbling in the sky. Your king is coming on a chariot through the clouds and you are ready to receive him. Let his presence wash away the worst parts of you. Memories fall apart as droplets touch your skin. Warm in the summer haze, burning skin long since left to turn ice cold.
[break][break]
Thunder fills your chest, rattles around in your ribs until you heart is shaken loose from where it belongs. It falls out into your hands and is still when your eyes fall upon it. For a moment you think the worst is true.
[break][break]
You are dead aren't you?
[break][break]
You can't quite tell.
[break][break]
And then the sound reverberates. Filling you from head to toe until it seeps into the ground. The soil and grass and flowers beneath your feet quakes with every step as you move forward. One step at a time. Three in and your heart beats. The thunder rumbles again as if it might try to steal away the sound of your heart and you think to yourself that you can't let it.
[break][break]
That sound is yours.
[break][break]
It is a sound like thunder in your chest and then it beats again, a thumping sound so loud the thunder recoils in the sky and returns again. Louder and louder still, the storm rumbles and the world shakes before you. It shakes until buildings begin to crumble, falling into pieces across the ground. You look to them and find your memories written on the concrete. Elegant words scrawled across their surfaces as you move around them, your heart still in your hands.
[break][break]
You do not linger on them, on how the world is crumbling around you. It's all drowned out in the sound of thunder and rain and the beating heart in your hands. The memories play across the stone steps you take, like small movies to distract you but you won't let them. They can't suck you in now, not yet, not before you make it to the end of the side walk.
[break][break]
You don't know why you have to make it there, why you keep running even as the earth falls away beneath your feet. You keep going, jumping from stone to stone, step to step, you have to keep you have to make it to the end-


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