Tonight

I was a teenager again

or maybe it was for the first time,

because in every other summer I’ve just been

a kid.

It is the first day of our last summer,

and we realize we can neither call ourselves

high schoolers, nor college kids,

and I say,

this is the freest we’ll ever be.

Here are

the few of us

on this sweetly humid day,

collapsed under the shade

of the trees that have grown with me

for almost eighteen years.

Left with sticky skin

and calloused feet,

we lay our heads in each other’s laps,

feeling the warmth of our bodies

and of the honey sky that wraps us up like a blanket,

protecting us from the thought of tomorrow,

allowing us to enjoy

the feeling of being label-less

and limitless;

of not owing anything to anyone,

if only for one summer.

If this is the only summer

I’ve got left

to be a teenager,

and the twenty-five days I have left

before I leave that word behind me;

before I owe the world anything at all,

then

I plan to be

the freest I’ll ever be.