season for wanting.
I want to go to the river and do what my cousin showed me how to do when we were ten: catch a trout in my bare hands. Bright and wriggling, sick from what's gone in the opaque and silty knee-deep water. I want to go to the river and leave my clothes on the high rocks the way I did when I was nineteen and I was meeting this girl called Freesia in the woods, late summer and a bunch of college kids floating like dead fish in the warm deep places that are or that become the French Broad. (I don't know when rivers turn into each other.) Let my feet dangle. Pretend I'm not worried about leeches and eels and pollution and those creepy dudes who sometimes come round to because they know young people like to go skinnydipping when the weather is fine and school is just begun or nearly over.
I want wormwood in my mouth (again). I want the taste of green. Carousel-dizziness. The Tackiest Lava Lamp In The Whole World slipping into beauty, even that corny dorm-room staple unfurling like the midday sky as seen from the scummy floor of a pond.
I want a June Miller to my Anais Nin (or possibly the other way around).
I want my hair to go white early, like my grandmother's did, but only if it goes white, not gray or that dingy yellowish-cream color you sometimes see on old people.
I want everything that shines a light. I want to let the holes in the world cover me like the mouths of tigers, swallow me under and away. I want to let go of what scruples I've got left. I want to not be scared of anything at all: it's only matter. It's only changes of state. Only that. (You do not have to be good.)