Then one by one the stars would all go out.

I fought to turn my face toward the light. His arms are a cage around me, tightened into a prison of sinew and flesh and I can't breathe. I push away and clear the sheet and take a deep, cool breath at last. The sun hasn't even come up yet. I have bested all of the celestial (and all of the demonic) beings to the start of this day and I'll take my spoils, thanks. 

A lot of people wondered if I finally got eaten by my bears, or maybe if I had gone to Burning Man against better advice and this time didn't make it home. Some wondered if I had given up on technology completely, bound for my orchard with a blanket and a good book to lie in the sun and eat cinnamon toast and drink all of PJ's honey mead, only to overdose on sugar and a sunburn and a story that catches my breath in my chest and never lets it go.

My eulogy would be long as fuck. I need to stay alive forever and you and I both know this. 

The fires are over for another year. We all grow older. My magical childhood and Jacob alike both beat a hasty retreat far from the golden hues of autumn and into the shadows, waiting for winter's darkness to bring both screaming back to the forefront to torment me just a little more. 

It's nineteen years this time around and I still am standing here, tiny fists jammed in pockets stuffed with every bit of love the boys have to offer me. I keep all of it. I reject and refuse nothing. I let PJ count the feathers on my wings and I never apologized for any of it, not even once. I let him turn me over and he read all the words like I was the evening paper and then I will send him off, well-loved and well-read. Dark and wondrous like the night and I will greet the day without looking him or anyone else in the eyes until at least three cups of coffee and the clock striking noon.

There's something so freeing about losing everything. You find yourself.  

Lochlan asked me if I was ever going to smarten up. 

Never. If you thought I was then you bet wrong, sir. 

He laughed that choking, strangled sob-chuckle that he does and my knees cave in again. It's like a Ferris wheel. You think it's about to stop but it keeps going around and round. 

We're back. I'm back. The bears are headed up into the hills, the final season of Outer Banks has been watched. I got to see Sarah McLachlan in concert which is almost a thirty-year bucket list concert for me and the leaves are turning orange and red at last. It's not hot anymore. It's not scary anymore. 

I did go to Burning Man. And once again I hated it. Fool me twice and all that. Then we took a detour and now we're back to reap the spoils of being missed. It's amazing.