The combination of sweat and coldness teased my skin, as I looked
over my body at my bare shaking legs. The ground was damp and polished
my feet with cutting clean moisture. The sky was an obvious amount
closer to my head, somehow eating up the space above me that I never
knew I needed. I wiped more perspiration off my face but the dirty
sticky feeling did not evaporate. I looked up to the sky for an answer,
but could not find one in the bulky shapeless variables of clouds.

I was in a meadow before rainfall. I was barely clothed. What I
found the most shocking than all of my erie surroundings was the figure
that was waiting in the distance. Me.

The spitting image of the six year old I once was stared back at me
with lack of misunderstanding. The french bangs swept across her face,
the cobalt blue eyes that had withered away into green ones. I stepped
forward, and she swiftly made her way front of me. She motioned
forward, and whispered a language I was unfamiliar with, “venha comigo.”

As we tripped through the wet grass of the meadow, I realized it was
all portions of things I had known inside of me, my world my existence
had built. As the burgeoning grass had been very color inside my eyes,
the azure sky the color of the dress I met the day I found him. It was
somewhat relieving torture, knowing the things I thought I had ounce
accomplished in forgetting, were still burred in the mechanics of my
human mind. It was a simple concept, what we see, what we feel, cannot
ever be erased.

I noticed the girl observing my thoughts as she played guest in my
temporary mind. She walked slowly, knowing I somehow couldn’t drink up
all of this color and memory at once, even if it was something I
created myself. She walked past images that now seemed brighter and
clearer, the ones I had strained every ache in my body to produce on
those late nights alone. She brought me back to the Sierra Nevada
mountains, she brought me back to the apple grove me and him had sat.
She brought me back to the places I was too weak to go on my own.

She traced me further back inside my mind, to times that were stormy
nights, days that I sworn had lasted forever. I traveled through the
outer linings of Mexico, and while other memories I had concentrated
harder to soak up every ounce of emotion that they provided. The place
I lingered was Orfillia Vineyards. I stayed there for years.

I walked through dark times, an ugly scar on beautiful memoirs. My
body was evaporating into the blankness of my current state. I seared
down to a thin mist by the time I saw the memory of her crying. Where
could I be going, if I was dissipating from myself? Without a body, in
this state of mind, I kept going, a drifter.

She traveled with me to places I swore I’d never return. The darkest
ones that consumed the back of my head, eating no light and sparking no activity. The ones I swore never happened. The police lights lighting
up my living room window, the questions I didn’t quite understand, the
hopelessness I felt as a child. She saw these ones too. She stared at
me as her face contorted into an expression I never knew a child could
produce, her colors started withering away into the non existent air…