Question: “When will you write again?”

Answer: I will write again when paint-chipped lunch tables and stale classroom air is not an experience but a memory. There are the days when wind cards through my hair and when jacaranda blooms rustle in the breeze and when locker room laughter feels like home. There is a sort of comfort in feeling a classroom orchestra breathe together, student and teacher and music and life moving as one. I had never known cinder blocks and steel staircases to be a soothing sight but when the day is done and work becomes play, it is as though freedom makes jungle gyms of our world. It’s strange to be living through what will become nostalgia. But there is beauty in the feelings of infinity, captured in moments passing like cloudbursts. I will write again when I know I can look back at high school and remember it for its best.

Answer: I will write again when I forget what is it like to love friends like family. School is hard, no matter who you are, but there was the time when we did each other’s makeup in the bathroom, both of us with no experience whatsoever and laughed til our lungs hurt. I remember bus rides where I didn’t know who I was singing with, only that astronauts must’ve heard us on the moon. Brownies and sprinkles have never tasted better than when they were shared with everyone who asked for a piece, everyone who joined in with a spectacularly off-key performance of ‘Happy Birthday’ in three different languages. I don’t know the name of the girl, and I never will, but she saw me crying in the hallway and gave me the fiercest hug, and when she told me it would be okay, I believed her. I will write again when I remember the times that ‘friend’ was just another word for ‘I love you.’

Answer: I will write again when the scent of lemonade and sunscreen fills my days. I can imagine dancing my way through every park in the world, collapsing in clover patches and listening to crickets’ gossip. The only thing better than an endless sky is an endless sea, watching white sails and sandcrabs tunnel through wind and earth. When sunshine and sea salt has soaked into my body, tacky like a second skin, I will feel my fingers itching to write. Sprawled beneath oak shade and wreathed in dusty sage blossoms, my best stories will come to life like shore herons, statue-still until they strike. I will write again when summer is not a season, but a feeling.

Answer: “I never really stopped in the first place.”