“Your picture-perfect postcard beach doesn’t move me. What I want is to come alive when I see you. I want to feel like I am seventeen again, and I am swinging on a rope swing under an old elm, and you are teasing me about my dress, and the light is hitting your hair, and you smile back at me like maybe I could be the one, and I manage to say something witty, and you laugh—and oh, your laugh is the closest I’ve ever been to god—and every good sense I have is lost in this moment, in this tiny razor-thin sliver of time, when you and I are human poetry, and dandelion cotton balls blow across the wind, and the sun starts to set, and we both look at one another and think things that neither of us will ever say, but will feel for the rest of our lives, every time we pass the park on Church Street, and remember how it felt, to be free. This is why you travel.”

Ash Ambirge