Every summer I have grown a taller, stronger, and my hair grows a bit longer. And every summer I forget the way things used to be, they aren’t the same anymore.

I can’t say I miss being a child, but I suppose that nothing will ever go back to the way they were.

As I tended to my mundane evening one day in early June I was struck by the sun’s blazing heat and scurried to the shade of a tree. I had carried on, giving only a thought of disgrace to such a scorching feeling.

It wasn’t until a few moments later, when the sun began its descent below the horizon, that I heard the buzzing in the trees.

They’re quite horrid creatures, as I have seen them. Cicadas burrow in the ground for years and emerge when summer arrives, just as swift as the other.

It wasn’t even the first night that they were there; however that evening, the cicadas were the heralds to my nostalgia.

For a very long time, all I wanted to remember were the days I spent in my neighborhood, blowing dandelion seeds into stale wind and other things that would never matter. They were things I thought I would never miss.

At the sound of such droning from the cicadas, I remembered hide and seek in backyards, choking humidity, sprinklers, and painting my legs and wet chalk. There were friendship bracelets and yard sales, bikes with training wheels, gravel paths next to the dreaded woods, the taste of popsicle sticks, and the smell of pool water in my hair.

I am not many years away from the childhood that I recall, but it feels too far away.

Maybe more than that I could remember the days when my lover and I met much the same as I have described; delirious days of comforting heat and long laughters.

It was not difficult to imagine her next to me, meandering without end. She would have felt the same, we did not know how much those summers were worth until we were out of reach of them.

The days of this yearning and wistfulness are yet to pass, and I still hold on to this summer as if it were the last. I fear that it is the beginning of my last summers, perhaps I will forget that l cared about them at all.

As I write this, September has begun, and now I have to listen closely to hear the cicadas.