The days are growing longer now, and soon I will sit on my porch-swing and watch the sun set. A book in hand, a cigarette, a lover. We'll watch, or I'll watch, our hands twisted like the tangles of thorns that grow wild on that land we went to. I'd like to go again, fish in a pond that doesn't belong to me just to see what my hook will bring up. We'll watch the days inch by the way lazy summer days do and we'll murmur things about 'love' like the time to leave this all behind will never come. We'll lay in the grass or in our beds with our heads together, the soft comfort of each other's hair between two skulls whose minds won't ever dwell on the same thing at moments like these. I'll always be wrapped up in the moment and the intoxication of it all, and he'll always be off somewhere rifling through countless thoughts that exist anywhere but the present moment. But that seems to be how men are. I'll grow my hair long and the sun will fade the spectrum of reds in it to pleasant golds and I'll go to school and work and come home to the pinks and purples and cicada songs of an evening in a Texas summer. This is the time for me to collect my memories, to start living a little more, to soak in the warmth of a time that is ending all too soon. I'm coming out of the loneliest winter, the bleakest spring, and when the days grow short again and the ochre tinge of autumn creeps in the horizon I want to be able to say that I lived the summer. I was a part its soft breezes, its glowing green days, part of the wide open bright blue of its sky. I floated by on its clouds and I danced along rocks in its creeks. I drove down a beautiful back-road with my windows down and my music up so I could feel alive again, so I could let the wind coming through my windows tear away at my old shell, a cleansing rush to remove all the stress and pain and hurt from seasons less kind.