Night Air

Children in summer are restless. Children in summer feel certain freedoms from floors and socks, hoping to amble in the sun and grass barefoot, dark skinned, hair tasseled and bleached from wind and chlorine.

I suppose I am not a child in summer anymore, long ago trading beach passes, bike rides and swings from summer concerts series, jobs and stuff that looks swell on college resumes. Banana peels and street chalk for cappuccinos and shopping receipts.

For some reason, tonight I wanted my pink Schwinn with the horn and to play house in the bushes. But we sold the Schwinn and the bushes have grown over the little house we made in the dirt below the shrub canopy. No. Instead, my body gets up out of the bed and my legs take me out of my room, my arms shut the door quietly and my feet are careful not to step where the floor is squeaky. My body caries me outside – in a slow crawl past the motion sensor lights – and to the end of the driveway to look at my neighborhood – a strange place at midnight.

Barefoot in the summer night, confused as to what I have done, not wanting to crawl back through the grass, I do the first thing that comes to my mind. I begin walking to my bus stop.

I get there and I stand, looking up hill for something – a bus, a pink Schwinn, anything. Maybe to tell me why I’m here and where I should go next.

The street doesn’t know. The trees don’t know. The gravel and the cloudy purple night sky don’t know.

Should I know? I don’t.

I’m just a girl, barefoot in grass-stained pajamas standing at a deserted corner on a quiet summer night with crickets that are just as restless as I am.

Then, there in the street light, I smiled. No, I didn’t smile, I laughed. I laughed at me and at the bus that won’t come until September, at banana peels and the scar on my right knee from jumping a fence back when my sister and I climbed tress and read Nancy Drew in the New Jersey summer. I laughed at the quiet houses and the neighborhood spotted with streetlights. And then I ran home, crawling back past the motion sensors and in through the dining room window.

Stumbling back into my room, I notice my clock is brighter than the moon, so I cover it up with my trendy black tank top and I hop back into bed and back into my life from my brief time warp.

If the sky falls tomorrow, I’m eating the clouds for breakfast.