Bittersweet

"If I could fall / into the sky / do you think time / would pass me by?"

          It's hard to put into words, but sometimes as I'm walking along a road and I see a heavy raincloud or gold-tinted leaf, it feels like I'm in Brookline again, for just a moment. I flicker back and forth in my mind, trying to deceive myself that I am still in Brookline - that the shriveled desert shrubs are actually great maples and oaks, that the crunching of dusty pebbles under my flip-flops is in reality a blanket of crispy leaves, and the breeze smells not of pesticide and freshly-mowed lawns but of dew and pine and autumn. 

          Any second now we'll drive away in our old red car to the nearest Dunkin Donuts and watch the frost blur the windowpanes, etching 'hello's with our fingers to a random passerby. Maybe if we feel like it we'll climb that boulder in your backyard again, and use it as our home base for the next top secret mission. This time around, I'll take in the faded chalk lines - the ghosts of our last hopscotch rendezvous, the click of our rollerblades in each crack of pavement as we try out that new trick Amanda showed us yesterday... I'll imprint every vine of twining ivy up our brick walls, all our pet ladybugs hiding in the pine, every wafting aroma of apple pie into my heart... and hopefully this time goodbye won't be so bittersweet.

"You are here in my heart and / my heart will go on, and on"