lily hills white

l'aube de ma vie

it’s as simple as this.

i’m not supposed to miss you. you’re another multiverse away. you’re the dawn of my life; the youth found when you forcibly rip back my supple flesh and crack open my rib cage, the one just behind my thoracic skeleton where my soul flutters with an insistent, persistent fervour.

you’re everything cliché:

long sunday drives,
playdates shared with friends
as we listen to our mothers’ laugh
over potluck and cabernet,
the electricity of childhood,
forbidden dives at the deep end
of the communal pool,
a father’s tight hug,
notes passed in homeroom,
green, green grass,
and the feeling of christmas morning
where life itself seems to fall away.

you’re no temporary summer. you’re humidity and warmth, fire ants, and limitless hills that stretch on. you’re honeyed peaches and salty sweat, beauty and longing, present and memory.

oh Georgia, you’re uppercased. you’re gala cheeks and lemonade mouth, skipping through garden sprinklers, and not knowing if forever could be measured, dusk water droplets in my lioness mane was the closest thing to timeless i’d ever feel.

because oh Georgia, childhood and you were just that,

temporary foreverness.