“Time heals all wounds.” It sounds so close to the truth, but time heals nothing, it just passes. See, if I’ve learned anything from my family, we were destined to crash sooner or later. So as I wash off last night each morning, I focus on the past and my thoughts race forward. History won’t just catch up with me, it’s insistent on overtaking my vision and continuing on incessant repeat. The problem is, I still remember the first boy I ever adored, and the last. They’re one in the same. A Kentucky dreamer with fireworks for eyes and an IPod of slam poetry. I never trusted his smile--I always had to work too hard for it--but I loved the color his cheeks turned when he was nervous, or uncomfortable, or telling the truth. That boy was my summer, and fall, and winter. We wrote poems side by side, the only difference was, he had talent and soul cowering behind a shield of comedy. I fell for his charm during afternoon adventure when he was caught in the arms of the sun and the uncertainty of English downpours. As I watched the wheels turn in his mind, I couldn’t help but recognize how the moonlight looked shining off of the hazy glass of his alcoholic eyes. I attempted to shush the warning signs, but time passed and distance remained. My feet didn’t belong with him. I knew this, but my mind remained reluctant to leave. I tried to separate myself from the pictures that lined my walls, because some accidents you see coming in just enough time to do nothing about them. Like watching your favorite glass bowl suicide to ground, not quick enough to save it from catastrophe. We were both blind to the rules of good timing. I should have realized this when the roles reversed. Once home, he started saying, “I love you” without being prompted. But it was the day he sent me poems that made me question distance and time and stupidity. Timing smothered all possibility. He stood in his corner of Kentucky, and I ran to the edge of New Jersey and we stretched out our arms, hoping they would find a way to wrap around 800 miles of highway and bring us back home to English summertimes sealed with thai-food dinners, sleepovers, and too many sun-filled rain storms to count with fingers. With Southern gods dancing on our eyelashes and too much love to know what to do with, we held on, and on, and on…