growing out the nest

I came home for the summer

after carrying the word with me for a year,

in a hidden storeroom of my brain

(somewhere between yearning and family).

Spent the sun-soaked afternoons picking cherries,

in a garden, once so familiar,

with mom grumbling about my thin frame

and the visible dips between my bones,

ones she never had the chance to watch growing.

Brother nagged me to create adventures,

to visit imaginary places our feet couldn't reach,

through spider webs of letters and quickly drawn breaths.

We travelled all across the globe,

minds quicker than the air-planes in the sky

(hopping from Japan on Friday, New York a few hours later).

Father caressed my hair,

as though the affection balanced out his silence of the last twelve months,

as though his hands suddenly gained the power to heal

concealed wounds of misplaced guilt and blame.

I came home for the summer,

three blissful months of remembering and forgetting,

treating each smile of my mother’s rose-pink lips,

each jab in the ribs delivered by my brother’s clumsy hand,

and each quick-fire sign of my dad’s involvement,

like a four-leafed clover, accidentally found and preserved to last ages,

somewhere in a dusty encyclopaedia.

I came home for the summer,

and although I left them no clues,

I said goodbye once the days started getting shorter,

waved them away with a limp wrist and put-upon negligence,

knowing all the while I would not be coming home next year

(and probably not the summers which came after).