((place intriguing entry title here))

in response to the prompt: write to one of your memories as though it were a person.


i remember you, rough warm pavement, that loved to stub little toes and scratch little hands, and coerced with sand so that causing little knees to bleed took much less effort than if they were working separately. i remember you like i remember the height of the basketball hoop. i was four and you were ten-thousand feet high. you pushed me while i pushed myself, a globe of pickled orange between my two palms: no bigger than baby maple leaves. up into the air, that familiar space between the ground and the sky; my outline lifted by the innocence of itself in the moment. i remember you too gravity, reeling me down again to meet the concrete warmth of the long driveway pavement lined with argus-eyed day lilies. it was then that the fabric of my knees tore, so easily, as if the worn threads of my seams had ripped. that scary bright color fell out, and small pebbles jumped in; i still have the dark spots to prove it. and i remember you fear; fear of my mother scraping the pre-scars with something antiseptic, and the pain it would cause and hiding in the red, two-story playhouse my father built within the apple trees; a quiet, self-healing, nursing of the surface where my leg bent in half. i remember you painfilled pleasant memory.