July 3rd. We hadn't really planned on hanging out but it had a way of working out, as summer always does. We smoked hookah. We drove with the windows down as fireworks exploded from front lawns. They played Mario Kart. We sat on the back porch amid the fireflies and the stars and the distant explosions listening to the National and Kanye West and everything in between. And we only went inside once the sky began to fade into the faintest gold and the birds began to sing. We slept on couches and floors, tangled up in each other and blankets and the early morning sun. At an hour too late to be considered breakfast anymore, we got breakfast at Bob Evan's, all of us still in clothes from the night before, the youngest people in the entire building and proud of it. The exhaustion hurt so good when I went to work that 4th of July night.

-RAY

These people and these sultry summer nights warm my heart to an absurd degree.

-RAY

I want these days to live in my veins, to stay even when my skin is no longer tanned like someone from Venice Beach, even when I no longer smell sweet and bitter like the sun. 

I want to always feel what it felt like to hear the boys wild Indian screams as they longboarded down the parking garage, turning the sharp corners, hunched over, concentrated, shirts blowing in the wind of speed, laughing whooping beaming ALIVE meeting us at the bottom. 

I want to hold onto that drive coming back from the downtown, me for once in the passenger seat of my own van and we had all the windows down in spite of, or maybe because of, the rain, Polish Girl blaring, the tree lined curving road mingled with early evening fog, and all of us together understanding.

-written July 6th

-RAY