Nostalgia

When we were young, we leaned into the wind,

faces tipped toward a future bright with dread and longing—

that exquisite trembling at the threshold of becoming.

Now the wind is at our backs,

and we lean the other way.

I remember when the trees were a greener green,

when the air was thin and clean as water from a spring,

when hours were long and heavy and full of themselves,

unwilling to be hurried.

Now they vanish like breath on glass.

There were too many books and not enough lifetimes,

too many languages curled inside foreign mouths,

too many dances I had not yet learned to ask of my body,

too many songs waiting in rooms I had not yet entered.

I was ravenous. I was gloriously, terribly hungry.

Where did she go, that girl

who found a whole philosophy in an afternoon,

who could stare at a wall and call it thinking,

who fell asleep not into darkness but into the antechamber of adventure—

lying still, heart quickening,

"what will I dream tonight?"

I miss the slow Saturdays most.

The coffee pale and watered-down, the toast thick with salt-butter,

the birds outside competing with the cartoons

my mother put on to coax me gently into morning.

The light through those wide windows had not yet learned to be harsh.

There was no wasted time then

because time had not yet learned its own name,

had not yet started counting.

Bring her back to me—

that hunger, that dreaming,

that willingness to be lost.

Let me stand again at the edge of everything,

trembling,

reaching.