Balmy summer nights and mandarin peels. How people move their hands when they speak. The intersection between past present and future, and everything that’s both lost and found. Human contradictions. Long fingers of light sweeping through a train carriage. Boys with soft, curious eyes. Boys with beautiful hands. All hands in general. Old people hands. Callouses and dimples and the way new skin grows back so much whiter, so much cleaner. Being touched tenderly, being touched brusquely, just being touched. My mother bending over in the kitchen, or on the bed’s edge rubbing lotion into her heels (a long ago). Split lips and honeysuckles. Abandoned roadside furniture and the way people try to say goodbye with their bodies when words are useless. Familiar cities that don’t feel like home, and unfamiliar ones that do. The smell of basil, the smell of cherry tomatoes, the smell of burned butter with garlic and onion. The fact that none of us really know where we’re going, but we’re going anyway. All this blind, mad hope and hearts that threaten to vibrate out of their nests. “We are all going forward. None of us are going back.”  ♥