Wrap your head with this material...

Lollipops, loop-de-loops, scooters and light sabers, sparklers and skipping. Bubbles abound amid summer sounds. Sprinklers on the hose and crystalized sweat all over us like we're churros, and we crawl under just the sheet for a few stolen minutes as we read, sweat-dried and our food settled. It's afternoon as the clouds thicken and consider whether there's enough there for rain. I hope there is so we can read longer, so we can play music or paint, but I also hope for sun so we can try out new binoculars. Summer is this energizing time when all of the minutes can be filled. We can hang a hammock and swim until the sun bakes us into submission. The songs lope and bop, filled with horchata and new best friends with lipgloss that glints from within like that connection you feel with a friend your soul has met again and again, tumbled together repeatedly through the drum of time, colliding and recognizing each other quicker each time. Man, that one friend you make is as exc

Do you ever suddenly scent someone? I mean someone not near you physically but you sense them like your own arm, and know their soul brushes yours? Distances or worlds are irrelevant. He could be right here or hundreds of miles away. I wonder if that is another reality so close, truth permeates this place. The ripples of the worlds atop one another, folded, creased together closest when I am about to drift off. It's right there, isn't it? I can smell it. I am hope, floating wispy and secret across a darkened night sky. No guiding stars, only a scent. And I release into a fecund night, my strings cut quick and off I float as a kite. Clouds that conjoin and dissipate, reform and streak, filmy advancing across a shadowy sky. The sensation of my nose gently grazing your neck, the laugh lines of my checks against your stubble. But aren't I asleep? Aren't you elsewhere? Yet, I feel the length of your body fit a crescent line against the back of mine, a support beam, a f

Do we need to debrief? Is it the same as bitching and moaning and generally degrading the quality of our conversation? Or is it a necessary process after going through something together. And I mean, in some sense we didn't even go through it together. After all, you were in your living room, and I in mine. Or your bed and my wingback chair. Or my kitchen table and your couch. Maybe we were so the same, and not; and so together, and yet not; that we've forgotten. We've survived a scary near-apocalypse. Don't get me wrong, I realize it could still happen. The virus is by no means over. I'm aware that in six months when the weather makes outdoor time more challenging, this may be a different world. But I was afraid I could catch it by running through a place someone had breathed hours before just ten weeks ago. So didn't we survive something? You and me. You in your Jeep and me hiking up a trail. Me in my barren Aspen grove and you in a waders in a stream?