charcoal sun bright and high in the summer evenings; the stars sunk into your skin and i called it sun-kissed, perfect, i ate those twelve sunflower seeds you wanted for the birds and said someone else must've done it. you cried, you cried a lot, then, i think, pink and purple stapled to your skin like a ripe fruit, sun-spot, sun-kissed; blackberry throat spitting up thorns.

      we watched the tulips bloom at the cusp of summer, mosquito season had it's turn and you and i watched with a hissing irritation when they left cherry lumps on our shoulders and legs. you were sour and sullen and i would stare at you through rose colored goggles, at your sunset red hair by the lake, strawberry seeds on your skin, star marks, sun spot. i stared, always, tried to count them one stilted summer tuesday, mid-afternoon. a lake without sand. you wanted to swim, brought a bathingsuit that stripped blue and white and this washed out red that looked almost pink— the sky was so blinding, a salty blue, just like your bathingsuit. 

      i called for you to stop, but you didn't, you just laughed and laughed. hair like fire whipping around and i stopped and stared and stared and stared. 

      when you came out of the water and you didn't have a towel so you told me to turn and i did. you'd changed, then, i knew, tank-top or wife-beater, whatever you'd call it, and to-your-knee shorts. this ugly tan color that you seemed to adore. you kept your hair short  that summer, shaved all the way to your head except the top. those were happy days weren't they? when you came out of the water. you said that the day was too hot, too long. i said that i could count your freckles before the sun, high and bright, changed the sky to that sunburnt color of your hair. 

      i couldn't, in the end. 

      you must've laughed when you thought back to that silly day. you must've laughed thinking back to that stupid day, thinking back to stupid me by that lake. stupid children. no one could ever count that high, and we were young, and dumb, or maybe it was just me. naive, stupid, me.

      who could every count that high, anyway?