Summer dreams…

Life is a short dream on a summer afternoon. One moment, you’re a kid, barefoot on the blacktop even though it burns, your shadow long and skinny in the late-day sun. The next, you’re older—maybe not old, but old enough to know better—standing at the edge of some nameless stretch of highway, watching the sky bruise and wondering how the hell the time got away from you.

You don’t get to choose what your mind keeps. Memory isn’t a scrapbook—it’s a junk drawer. It hoards things you don’t need, tosses things you wish you had, and every once in a while, it coughs up something you forgot existed. You can’t hold onto the whole picture, only the pieces. A song on the radio that slams you back into the passenger seat of a car that probably doesn’t exist anymore. The smell of cut grass on a July evening, and suddenly, you’re running through a backyard that belongs to your childhood, your knees scraped, your breath tasting like Kool-Aid and adventure.

The big things fade. The little things stay. And that’s the trick of it, isn’t it? That’s the joke. You won’t remember the moment your life changed, but you’ll remember the way the dust swirled in the sunlight through a half-open window. You’ll forget entire conversations, but you’ll remember the way someone looked at you across a room, like they knew something about you that you didn’t.

Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. Maybe life isn’t meant to be boxed up and labeled, neatly stored on some shelf. Maybe it’s supposed to slip through your fingers like fireflies on a humid night—close enough to touch, but never quite yours to keep.

And still, we chase it. We dig through old photographs, return to old haunts, searching for something we can’t name. But the past is a house with no doors, only windows we can press our faces against. We can look, but we can’t go back inside.

There’s a kind of sadness in that, sure. But there’s something else, too. Proof that it all meant something. That the dream was real, even if it ended.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe we don’t need to hold onto everything. Maybe it’s okay that the afternoon fades, that the dream dissolves into twilight. Because for a little while, we were here. We felt the sun on our skin, we laughed with someone we loved, we stood beneath a sky that had been waiting for us all along.

And if we’re lucky—if we listen closely enough—we’ll still hear the echoes, long after we wake.