Summer

Summer 

Is the color of the sky from my foggy window as I board the flight back home.

The taste of my silent tears which I try to inconspicuously wipe in an airplane full of sleeping people.

The sound of my heart beating louder at landing as it realizes it is almost touching the soil it came from.

The voice of my mother, in my ear, welcoming me home. The scruff on my father's chin, an itch I never thought I would crave. The new wrinkles around their eyes beaming with unsaturated longing. The delicate unrelenting arms of my littlest sister as she holds on to me for dear life. 

Summer 

Is my room with its butter yellow walls and pretty lace curtains and my bed as freshly made as I left it months ago, warmly beckoning.

The tears that shouldn't still fall but do as my head settles into my pillow and I inhale the unique fragrance of my own safe haven.

The first breakfast I have surrounded with chatters of love and life, and the days of timeless bliss which follow with not a hint of reckoning.

The voice of my mother, in my ear, saying goodbye. The unshed tears in my father's eyes which I want to erase from my repertoire. The new wrinkles around eyes still beaming with unsaturated longing. The delicate quivering arms of my littlest sister as she slowly lets me go, only to come back for another hug and another and another until I force myself away and into the car, and wave even after the bleak night has long kidnapped them from sight. 

Summer is going home and somehow finding a portal to that magical land of innocence and safety and peacefulness and warmth which I had left behind, and leaving home to growth and possibilities and chances, all beautiful, but distant from where my spirit lies. Summer is feeling painfully whole for a little bit only to once again fracture a million times.