only the saying goodbye. I remember the eighth-grade sullenness at the way they’ d torn up the concrete, put in flowers and trees, bringing wildness to our almost-suburban home. All undone now, ten years too late.
It was real to me then, I think— that anger, resistance to an inevitable shift, unstoppable as the earth itself. Now it is all disappearing, faded like an old photograph album, only stories and scents and the faint taste of dust on my tongue.
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