Cherry
There is girl who lives inside a song, a song from a summer that never happened. It’s a slow, wordless melody of long warm afternoons. It’s yellow and green, sunlight filtering through tall grass, flecks of seeds floating in the air. Most of all, it’s a girl with sandy hair.
She’s seventeen, a few months younger than I. In this song, this fragment out of time, I don’t know how we met. We eat sandwiches in the tree shade and all I can think about is how her eyes crinkle when she smiles. I want to touch her. I want so badly to stroke her hair. I don’t even know what I want. There aren’t words yet for this kind of desire. The melody winds gently through all these images, soft and fine like the tiny hairs on her arms which catch the light sometimes, just right. It drifts and fades, promising something that never existed.
In this imaginary perfection we’re too young to understand what lies ahead. We have no history, we have nothing but time as the warm notes float lazily past. In this alternate summer she is my love, a girl I’ve never touched. We talk in the space between pines, we lie on our backs and name the clouds, and we run through that field, dancing, daring the rain as we breathe the deep chords like something warm and sweet. We collapse together in the tall grass as the strings ache in anticipation, as I look into her eyes. Girl, boy, song and world meld to a point, a pause, a standstill cadence as I stare into the remembered eyes of a girl that never was. There is nothing to say, nothing –
and –
sweetness softness of her lips as the music returns and brims overfull, the smell of her oh the smell of skin and grass and hair and soap and a hundred strokes of her hairbrush in the cool mornings as I’ve watched her so many times. My lips approach hers as her closed eyes crinkle as every instrument cries at once in the soundtrack to a life I wish I’d lived –
God I love her so much. Oh God, I think I’m going to die every time I hear that chorus. In my real years, I lived in winter. There were no green fields, but I can hear them now, and I can see her now, and I know that she existed. What difference does it make? Where is the line between memory and imagination? This girl who lives in the song is the first love I should have had, the first love I did have, a retroactive dream. I cry to hear her in those notes, I cry for the girl I lost and the boy I was, and for knowing now — for knowing what could have been, knowing everything that I have felt in my life and everything that I could have felt — for art, for a song, for the whole innocent world as it still exists within me now. For the summer of my first love. I miss her so painfully. Every time I hear that song I want so badly to reach out and touch her cheek.
