Lessons From the Kissing Booth

The breeze shifted for a moment, smelling exactly like Arizona, barefoot and dusty and halfway in love, careening through the scrubland with no one around for miles. The air sweetened later that night, the only lights from our car, staying awake by looking for shooting stars and never finding them. I think about that some afternoons, everything right and happy underneath the open empty sky, all those minutes still spooling out over the desert. There's still a me out there somewhere, holding all of that in my hands.

And then the wind shifted back and I found myself plain old bareheaded in the rain like usual, walking nowhere much toward nothing at all, sinking slowly into the sidewalk. I'll blame it all on the wind, all the mistakes that happened or maybe didn't or even more likely are still happening, all this wind that nudges at my bones and pulls hard on my limbs. Sometimes it's only that the weather turns and I can't help but turn with it and wait for everything to shift again.