dandelion wine..!

I remember summers when I was younger being full of dandelions.
I would spend every afternoon braiding hair crowns and anklets from the most beautiful yellow flowers I could imagine flocking on hillsides all over the park.
I was heartbroken when I came home and my mother sniffed at my pollen stained hands in disdain, telling me dandelions were weeds; that instead of bouquets scattering the ground
left by lovelorn boys, they were parasites choking the life out of the tiny blue blossoms, out of the honeysuckle.
It was years before I learned that the only real thing separating
a wildflower from a weed is that we say it to be so.

I can’t remember much about last summer, except that it was full of you. We would spend days lying in the grass across from your old middle school where you swallowed too many dreams and fooled around with girls too young to differentiate that kind
of heat from the summer sun’s. You fiddled with your guitar strings and I talked about how I was going to be the next big thing in literature; you hummed in appreciation for every sore metaphor I dragged out of my throat and I clapped after every song you claimed to write, but didn’t actually. We thought we were geniuses, smoking on bridges and spouting off about god-touched minds in a town polluted by the smell of suburbs we swore we didn’t belong to.

You hated the term high school sweethearts but that was really all you could’ve ever been,

and when you were no longer that you couldn’t manage to be a single damn thing else but of course it was enough at the time to make me promise over and over again never to leave, as if just saying it would make us a wildflower instead of a weed. And so we remained, mouths sticky with too much watermelon and too much promise, singing the days away as I built a home for my forever in you, somewhere I thought I would be planting all of my dandelions because goddamnit I still loved the colour yellow and you still loved the way I looked with flowers in my hair,
but I’ve been aiming an eraser at all the metaphors I wrote for you last summer because we’ve been pushing daisies instead for a long time coming now and let’s face it, babe - we were never wildflowers, we were never even wild.