"I don't think you're taller than me yet, buddy" -- To a nephew, 11, that is staring me right in the eye with that smile I've known since he gave his very first one. I kissed his cheeks and sent him on his way, with him looking like a man in jeans and muddy boots.
Scene: Fade Out
"What did you ever see in me?" A high school boyfriend asked me, after 11 years of not talking. We're on hour five of conversation. I gave a long, in depth answer about how he was the yin to my yang, and that he was good for me in ways that he didnt know yet. I didn't tell him the truth in that his smell and the way his lips tasted was almost all that I saw in him and that memory was strong enough to keep me on the phone with him.
"What did you see in me?" I asked. A pause.
"You were hot," he said.
Scene: Fade Out
"She's pregnant. I need you. Only you. Talk me down from this," she says to me before dawn.
I sit up and steel myself.
Scene: Fade Out
Crossing a busy intersection on my way to a job that I could care less about right now. "Don't use again" I'm frantically texting on my cell to a boy who is seven light years away from me but I'm rolled up in, just the same. Kissing in the car as we did 11 years ago.
Scene: Fade out
My sister, 7 months pregnant, and my neices and me on the bed. They are 5 and 3. Their baby brother kicked and made my sister jump. "bad baby brother!" Everyone yelled. We found where his butt was located in her belly and spanked it. Rolled around and tickled and screamed. Went to sleep. Brooklyn sighs, throws her arm and leg over me. "I love lou."
The next morning, the four of us (plus baby brother in utero) crammed onto the four-wheeler to find pregnant cows, the girls' daddy working the fields, and then came home to make pancakes.
Scene: Fade out
Sixteen year old neice plunks herself in my lap on the porch swing. I kiss her back beside her tank top strap. She curls into me like she did when she was a baby. "Do you want me to get up?" She asks.
Never.
Fade out.
The month of May. A snapshot of a few of a million moments, tied up into my reasons for living. I could have pinpointed so many more.
My heart is full.
