Thinking Back

Someone's long hair flowing to the album You haven't yet heard before Almost asleep lying on the green Grass I can almost imagine You look up through the translucent fabric Of the young tree you lean on Into the depths of the blue sky that shrouds The edge of the brick high school just out of view The seniors lie around you Talking or humming making a face to the lens In a month you're the senior and they're off to college But that'll be a dream for another time Looking back at you Wondering What it's like To be you Or to be me Looking back at you Wondering What it's like To be you Or to be me You'll stay under that tree watching the world stand As still as time in that precarious frozen moment Even when you're a senior thinking back a year When everyone around you hadn't yet graduated You walk taking in Not your familiar surroundings But rather that spring day a year earlier As alive as that tree and as real as you were From college I think back to that walk When my home still was the city you knew for years Sometimes it's hard to believe that once You weren't just someone I looked back on Looking back at you Wondering What it's like To be you Or to be me Somehow you were My reality If each moment Is a prototype For the next then the friends that you knew were Early drafts for who I know now The series of afternoons from that spring are Days that don't exist Except in screenshots and Memories inside of memories The lucid emotions of listening to The Strokes And staring up into the canopy At your high school With my eyes shut