you were younger and wanted more but now you're older and you want what you could've had if you'd had the sense to take it when you were younger

These are Boxer days. There are also a few Alligator days, too. Hopefully they will also become Trouble Will Find Me days.

The early evenings when the sun hasn't completely set, and there's a breeze. Or, there doesn't have to be a breeze, the air can be still, too. If I want it that way. If you were there and I could control the weather to fit the mood.

The sky lightening from a deep robin's egg at the top of the dome to the pale, butter-tinged blue around the horizon. Margarine-edged clouds of white, of gray.

Those were the days--riding around in my mom's '90 Tempo, rattling muffler, early-to-late evenings taken up by things my young friends invited me to. Knowing I was getting ready to leave in a few months, knowing there was a guy who liked my friend and his friend liked me with a fervor that I didn't return, and deliberately so. There was still an innocence, then, there.

There was only one album I listened to for two months. Tight, driven, yet wild snare beats mixed in with the subtle and powerful tom sounds; the polished, yet wispy, intermingling riffs of the guitar and bass; the piano chiming in every now and then; those words and that deep, rich, wine-induced baritone, singing of lazy problems like an arm extended straight from the elbow, resting on the arm of a comfortable living-room chair, the neck of a bottle of red threatening to escape the grasp of its master's fingers.

Hazy sunshine. I was onto something, but it kept slipping through my fingers, like the sunshine did. I was onto something, but I was too busy working fast food and avoiding unwelcome advances under guises of innocent puppy-love at blues parties.

"We miss being ruffians, glowing wild and bright--
In the corners of front yards, getting in and out of cars.
We miss being deviants."

Now I'm deliberately avoiding the two guys I "connected" with on a dating site because I realized that that's not me. I'm realizing that feminism is a perfect fit for me, and maybe it's because a lot of it gives me an excuse to be me. I don't date. I don't do "the adult thing." Is that what adults do? I don't do what "adults" do, I don't hang out where the late-twenty-/early-thirty-somethings hang out. I don't want to "date."

I want you. But only as much as you want me, if that's anything at all.

I miss being nineteen. But I would never go back there.