Sun

I was raised in the sun. From birth to 7 I lived at 1825 Eucalyptus Street in Seaside, California.

 
The sun was in me. 

I dream about this house more than any human or place. 

The deck that I pretended to paint with a bucket of water and a paintbrush. The sun won  every time I turned around to check my dark mahogany progress; faded now back to butter brown. Josephine would watch All My Children first and then Days of our Lives while napping on said porch in those licorice looking braided plastic lawn chairs. She'd watch with her ears only while I painted, or played, or daydreamed, or dressed up, or did any bright thing. Do I idealize this time because it's so far away? I don't think so. On bikes til the auntie street lights came on. Rainbow striped carpet with cats and dogs and love only.

I have been shown photo albums of this chapter of my life. I am always not just smiling, but beaming with wonderment. Big eyes, big cheeks, steady open pout. When I have moments, and there are many of these moments of deep-wave sadness, I think about those photo albums, and all that joy, against today's politics, war, genocide, colonialism, corruption, this fucking revolution which everyone I know feels on the brink of. 

But that's the thing about the sun, you can receive it whenever it shows up like the house in my dreams. And I'll always have that house. Years untouched and so compact that it's as if the day he came into our lives, the clouds came in.