You rode in with the wind tonight.  That crisp smell of summer nights crept in through my open windows, and let you take hold of my senses while I was unaware.

This used to be the air of old Augusts, when the dampened breeze from the River would whisk through the orchards and envelop me as I scanned the sky for falling stars.  This was the air of Independence Days on Fair Street, as I waited for the fireworks; every year enthralled by the same orgastic display, sprawled out in the beds of old pickup trucks with sodas and cousins by my side.

In later years, this was the pine-tinted air of the Friday night football games at the very beginning of the school year.  The air was cool, but not to too cold as to preclude us from buying the ubiquitous Coffee’s On iced coffee.  This was the air of moonlit walks through the cemetery; of awkward beginnings and of nervous hands intertwined with a girl for the first time.  

And after some years, this became the air of reality.  This was the air that surrounded you and I as we lay out on your trampoline and spoke of demons and magic, and of God, and of all the things we wished were right in our worlds.  A winter came and went, and the air returned outside my open windows as we slept side by side, where I eagerly made that unconscious leap to rest my fate upon your shoulders.  I fell in love with you in that instance.  

And then the air became stale.



Summer nights were now spent alone, counting off the seconds, the minutes, the days, the months that I would wait for you.  I lay alone on the trampoline, watching the same old stars laugh at me above the dancing pines.  Even when I returned to the orchards from time to time to get away, you pursued me; coming in off the River with the breeze that was now dampened only by my own tears of regret.

I became despondent in these temperamental nights.  Everything for the sake of myself became meaningless – the Friday night football games, the iced coffee, the good old times with friends and the walks through the cemetery - I let you claim it all, until even the fireworks on Independence Day were nothing more than some silly bright lights to me when I compared it to your importance.

And although you may be on your way back, and I may be on my way out, and we may all be closer to real life than we’d ever thought we would, the air will never feel the same again.  I must keep this dark summer air at bay for as long as it takes me until the day I am done with you.  So tonight, if just tonight, I’m going to close that window, regain my senses, and go to sleep.

You will be the last thing on my mind.