It's May

It’s May. And the love flowing from me is the same love that has always been. I remember picking wild flowers and fishing with my dad, squirming from the glint of the gills. “You do it. I can't hook him.”

I catch myself in constant doom. Spirals of panic and scarcity. Everything always feels like it’s leaving. Even in solitude, life looks like running water through my fingers. I can’t help but make everything the detriment of itself.

When I think of the end, I think of the present. I worry too much about not appreciating anything to its fullest capacity. 

I can't help but think about what I'm missing. Where I grasped too hard. Where I didn't grasp hard enough.

I can't help but think about the end when I see my favorite smile. It’s hardwired in me somehow, to look for signs. Remember the noise, smell the air. To understand the grief before its arrival. To taste bittersweet in every bite.

The heat of May always invokes those sticky summers filled with fishing, listening to cicadas, bored out of my mind. Yet I'm always looking for ways to get back, to make time stretch like it did then. When I could look at a fish and be filled with wonder and disgust and not worry about what that meant in the context of everything.

I think May is here to remind me.