As the sun laid its head across the pillows in the sky, everything clicked with the clock’s routine. Blinking bright, a sacrosanct seven rolled across the screen; along with the time, light disintegrated as it slyly slid behind the horizon as if it carried a secret that humans could never understand.

There, protected by a scratched dashboard, I rested with one leg tucked beneath the other, unconsciously cowering from the gravity of that swift second.

The galvanizing gravity of acceptance—something so infinitesimally small yet subjectively salient in life—of that moment seized my mind.

Slick sadness slipped from my eyes in soft streams as a result of that not-so-ephemeral wash over my senses. They abraded the grooves in my face silently and stealthily as the night hours sounded for it. Radio silence somehow sang within the ironic lack of radio, the background to the soundless settling of the sour stew of sad tears upon my lap.

With no one else but myself, I sat sobbing in a Subaru at sunset.

Those soft streams of sad sobs were silent as the thief, commonly named grief, snatched my focus. It demanded my sorrow eyes see the past, see those days, see the smiles, see the sad, see the summer mornings, see the evanescent shimmers of superior times.

Oh, grief—smeared in shifted acceptance—opened my eyes with demeaning demands to see once more.

To see me.

Me in a context greater than two letters could ever carry. Visions of me smiling slid into my vision followed by me as a child, silly and sunny with a grin grander than any canyon. Varying visions all vexing my mind, that moment, that swift second with fading ideas and mesmerizing memories, yet each “me” was rooted in the past.

Swimming through this sea of images—a sea of stumping stupefaction—in my mind while the clock rolled into eight unsuspectingly hurt me with a sharp realization. 

Those past moments are no more than mere memories; they are no more than fleeting clips of what used to be.

Yet life will never be those again. I will only have these sentimental seconds of surrender to save those feelings, ideas, and times once more.

Those moments will never subsist in these days and neither will those versions of me.

I’ll never be the me from yesterday. I’ll never be the one you once loved, the one you cried to, the one you cried about. I’ll never be that me, the one who simply smiled into smizing mirrors.

I’ll never be this me again, sobbing in a Subaru while the sanctuary sun slips away.

The reel of the past serenely skimmed once more through my mind, and I hoped that maybe sought-after time could sanguinely repeat itself just one more salvageable time. I hoped that maybe I’ll be back in this Subaru when the sun sets its head against the saccharine sweet clouds ahead again. Maybe I’ll be the one everyone wants me to be next time.

Maybe—just maybe—I’ll be the one I want to be, the one that makes you proud.