today's justwrite (...)

Take off your shoes but leave your feet on because the time will come when you need them most, time to run, which is harder to do on your palms until the callouses build up, as big as a small town with new people coming through, only for the weekend to watch the green melt from the leaves. They'll be transparent soon, grey veins standing out against the sky, thinking they're clouds until the rain doesn't come and the violets reach their yellow throats into the air but taste only wind and wither and shrink back into the Earth like children do often when they're caught breaking rules, putting themselves into time-out to save hours they'll need later in life, when spring comes to early and stays too late, March coming in like three lambs arriving on the same morning, then leaving like an efficient dog with not-shifty eyes and many stories she'd prefer to keep to herself. The moon comes more slowly on weekdays, when the sunlight teases the window shades into thinking there's time to play, time to chase shadows and build bridges to Terabithia or Paraguay or another place that doesn't exist when you're a teenager, too old for imagination but too young to care because they tell you that's how it's always been and how it is and how it will end before it begins again, repeating itself like history or a history professor who left his coffee mug in the kitchen and his glasses in the wrong pocket and keeps pacing, like a soldier who's lost his place but not his shoes, tracing the back wall and ignoring the shadows, the empty-eyed faces with minds in the gutter if that's where last night fell when you dropped it. The time will come.