i choose to remember you not as you always were but as you were that night we went hunting for tadpoles. before, there were more important things to worry about than ambushing young amphibians--the forboding documents with fast-approaching deadlines, machines in need of repair...

"but not tonight."

detaching you from the shade of artificial light was never easy, but i think you were looking for an escape, any sort of diversion to remove yourself from this world you, in submission, called home. sometimes, i regret not being anything more to you than this, but i cherish it nonetheless.

we dove into softly sprinkling raindrops, and i held you back when you tried to return for the umbrella. shelter, we need no shelter tonight.. blessed to be drowned in rare moonlight. seeing you smile amid the downpour, percipitation unashamed to rest on your face, gave me the impression that we would forever stay as young as the rain.

i raced you to the pond and i don't remember who won and it doesn't matter because we were both there in the end. hidden between marsh grasses & what sufficed for a shore were a number of tadpoles... pitiful creatures, unable to possess a form of their own. we ceased stomping in the mud and began stalking them in the shallow waters, pridefully aware of our unfair advantage.


remember.... how, when i slipped and wetness was all around... then, how only you were there, warm comfort in cold rain.

thunder and lightening were colliding close by, so we admitted defeat and playfully scampered back to the house. inside, clothes, shoes, & ourselves were out of place in such clean surroundings--and it felt marvelous to be so unwelcomed into something so defined.

***

the next day, when you were stationed once again at your desk, all furrowed brow & serious face, i took a walk back to the pond. the sound of laughter strangely absent echoed more intense than did the thunder of recent memory. in the sunlight, the water was a repulsive shade of green and the tadpoles were hideous monsters. tears for all the scene's lost perfection i deemed vain, yet still could not refrain from lamenting.

but found in sandstone like ripples, raindrop impressions and mudcracks retold how we, once children, fell into each other, forgetting we would be lost with the evaporating drops.


all i found was this, but it was all...