I think the sunny spells, muggy days and sticky rain of this month will always remind me of May 2016.
It was the start of my American summer and the end of so much.
It's still something I hold close to my chest, a story that no one fully knows. Before Eva, before my parent's divorce, before graduation and life after uni.
Two years on, and days and moments are still scored into my memory. And, for a girl who cannot picture anything, I can see it all.
I was so hopeful, so driven, so uncertain.
At the time I thought I was being pragmatic, almost sensible in how I approached my relationship with Connor. Though how I managed to convince myself of that I'll never know.
We were so, so young.
The seasons turn in May, it gets warmer and brighter, dipping into grey showers without warning.
It's my birthday, my time for reflection and dissection and decisions.
And this year I find myself reflecting on that early Summer two years ago, thinking about the river and our sublet and our porch and that life we somehow scraped together in what little time we had.
We still don't have much time, 10 days in 20 months, a trip squeezed between redundancy and relocation, brief conversations when I'm not working or sleeping. Though soon I'll be back in that town with that river, a sublet and a makeshift double bed.
But we are not what we were.
Love means something different now, something maleable, something subtle, something that requires sacrifice and attention, something that we know and feel in some place beneath our skin.
May 2016 was like nothing I could have ever imagined or written. It reminds me of our wildness and our softness.
I feel the dampness on my skin in the May humidity and I'm back again.
It's no easier, this life of ours, and it requires us to make a decision each and every time we speak about whether we want to do this, whether this is worth it, whether we are okay with who we are and where we are going.
We don't and won't and can't always look like two kids in love on a porch.
But sometimes, when the sun has sunk and its still warm and my skin sticks to my jacket, it's nice to remember that we once were.
