summer takes over and we spend the next three months urgently packing as much life as we can into our brief summer heat

because we’ve been drowning in snow banks and we’ve been choking on blizzards,

wisconsin winters freeze us over and i swear i'm like a flower when the ice hits,

i die only to return when i see it fit, when the sun kisses warmth onto my back,

when i can feel the heat on my eyelids as i put my face to the sky and see the red glow from the other side

i want to move somewhere where the snow will never touch me, i want to go outside coatless everyday and all year long, no layers to weigh me down,

but i think something would be missing, there would be silence where i once heard orange and yellow leaves crinkling beneath my feet,

the city would be too loud at night where there was once snow overflowing off of roofs and out of yards, clinging to every barren branch and muffling every sound,

there would be no army of emerging dandelions for that one week in june, reaching for the sky for the first time in a year, eager to taste the sun,

it would be quiet where there once stood a hall of grade school kids zipping up coats and sliding on boots to go play outside in december,

there wouldn’t be any threats waiting for that first person to complain about the summer sun, because would you really rather it be forty below?

and my house would never shake with the force of five snow plows driving by in an hour during the biggest snow storm of the year,

and i would never taste that first breath of the changing air, when the breeze turns crisp in fall or when the earth starts to unthaw for spring and you can smell the season coming your way.

what if i grew bored of short sleeves and cicadas screaming every day?

and what if i start to miss cycling through the seasons like clockwork, the feeling of them each returning like an old friend?

what do i do when i need everything to change and stay the same?

I’m not sure what any of us are supposed to be doing, and with these drones in our back pockets and screens being meticulously superglued to every surface, the world feels too loud and too demanding. No one seems to have noticed their hours and attention have been getting sold on street corners for less change than you’d find at the bottom of my purse. They tell us to follow our dreams, but if they don’t fit into an eight hour shift or biweekly paycheck, the adults smile sweetly at us like we’ve said something cute, and say okay but what’s your real plan?

They make us confess our desires, putting tubes down our throats and pumping our stomachs dry until they know they’ve hollowed out every last outlying ambition, until they’ve made us into cookie cutter children, ready to fill out cookie cutter applications and live out cookie cutter lives.

My minds digging through history trying to figure out where we went wrong. I feel like at some point, being great- being more, was a good thing. I’ve been asking around, trying to figure out what the end goal is here, but there doesn’t seem to be a consistent answer. I’m beginning to wonder if anyone actually knows. One man told me it was all about finding myself, and another told me knowledge is the banquet of this life. I’ve had some say it’s about family, or hard work, or travel. A good chunk seem to think its about appeasing the man in the clouds, so they can go live there too. But every answer leaves me with more urgent questions. Why?

Whywhywhywhywhy? why.why.why. I need to know

No one can get more than a couple questions deep before they’ve found themselves confused as well, shifted from their comfortable feeling of knowing. I nudge them until they’re screaming questions at the sky with me (we need to know!), until they’ve joined me in running through the streets, asking everyone in sight. How long until someone chuckles at our restless searching, and calming bestows us with The Answer. Or how long until there’s no one calm left. How long until we’re all left screaming?