There was a summer when I believed in everything—when the world still hummed with secrets I hadn't learned to doubt. My bare feet knew every crack in the sidewalk, every dandelion that pushed through concrete like small acts of rebellion against a world that said grow only where you're planted.
I would crouch low, eye-level with those golden crowns turned silver ghosts, and gather them in my small fists. The ritual was sacred: one deep breath, then the exhale that sent wishes spiraling into the blue-wide sky. Make mama smile again. Let the neighbor's cat come back. Give me wings, give me wings, give me wings. The seeds danced on invisible currents, each one a prayer I was too young to name but old enough to need.
Evenings stretched like taffy, sweet and endless. I'd lie on my back in the grass, counting stars until the numbers tangled in my throat—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty-something—my finger tracing constellations that maybe weren't real but felt true in the darkness. The sky was a ceiling I could almost touch, close enough to hold my secrets, far enough to keep them safe.
And oh, the cars—silver fish swimming through suburban streams, their headlights cutting through dusk like promises. I'd chase them down the street, my heart hammering bird-wing frantic, believing if I ran fast enough, if I wanted hard enough, I could catch the light itself. My shadow stretched long behind me, a girl-shaped echo of the woman I'd someday become, though I didn't know her yet. Didn't know she'd remember these moments like pressed flowers in a book she'd forgotten she owned.
The magic wasn't in the catching—it was in the running, in the believing, in the way my breath tasted like possibility and my dreams were still small enough to fit in dandelion seeds. Before I learned that wishes are just exhales into an indifferent universe, before the stars became distant suns instead of night-lights hung just for me.
Now, when I pass children blowing dandelions, I feel it again—that flutter in my chest, that whisper of what if. And sometimes, when no one's watching, I'll pluck one for myself, close my eyes, and remember what it felt like to believe in everything at once.