We were all this young once. We were all this young and we were lively, quick as frogs, frictionless.

In the early days of summer our bare feet were like tender buttons. We ran and played and rode bicycles, we hurtled heedless around our small worlds, casually reckless, more kami than kaze. We stayed out too long in the sun, we ate too much of the wrong things, we skinned our knees and bruised our arms, and we didn’t care. We ran and played and fell down exhausted at the end of day and slept like snuffling puppies.

We were all this young once, and when we got bored, it was a boredom without horizon—a boredom that stretched out limitless and timeless, a boredom so deep and powerful it could suck in and crush entire planets, an eternity of boredom that could only be extinguished by the discovery of a bit of blue string or maybe a curious-looking bug, or something to do with robots.

We were all this young once, and we still are. Our bodies refuse to acknowledge it, and the mirror tells us different, but this is still us. And summer—summer is still in us. It’s still in us, still hot and happy and endless as a sentence without a period