somedays i want so badly to be taken back to eighth grade. sitting on the bleachers in the gym at lunch drinking sprite which seemed like such a treat. i want to go back to the time when i mumbled latin tiredly as i got dressed on mondays, preparing for my usual quiz. and it just seems so unfair that people don’t remember us anymore. they don’t remember a boy who hazel eyes who had a habit of quoting musicals, laughing with a girl who had freckles on her face. they have long since forgotten us. and some days, i have to. there may be a few people who remember us. but not really. they don’t know of the summer i spent sitting on a lake house porch, letting my fingers mess lazily with the hanging strings on my jean shorts, falling in love with his voice over the phone. they don’t know how grief hit my like a lightning bolt and how my voice caught over the phone in raw sob. they don’t know that this boy told me of adventures that i had never had and i told him stories of ones i wanted to. they don’t know that this boy is the only one of my friends who remembered my birthday and gave me a gift. they don’t know that this boy quoted his favorite musical to me and butterflies erupted in my stomach. they don’t know of the summer that i spent trying to put all the pieces of me back together again and how this boy made me remember my name. That summer i called magical. because it didn’t matter that he was a boy who went everywhere and i was a girl who was afraid of the space between the mailbox and her house. it didn’t matter as long as his hazel eyes met my blue ones, and his voice echoed over my phone. all that mattered was that he was boy who  made me remember my name and i was a girl who said his in a way that he had never heard before. but this magical summer ended. school started and i didn’t see my boy with hazel eyes that much anymore. and suddenly all the pieces i had carefully lined up in perfect order shattered. and there was no lake house. and there was no lazy summer conversations about dreams and the wind. and there was no fudge cake. there was only me and him in a high school that seemed determined to make me forget my name again. and i did. because to a girl like me, changing is unstoppable. i am such a caterpillar stuck in a never ending cycle of unexpected change. the school calls me by a name that seems strange. cold. and i wish that i could go back to eighth grade and hear him call me loudly in the hall. but it’s not eighth grade anymore. and so this new girl that i am under a name that he has never called me, she stopped replying to his messages. she ignored her email. she didn’t give him her sunny smile in the hall anymore. because he might want me to be that summer girl who quoted poetry shyly and laughed loudly. but i am not her anymore. and there comes a time when you realize that i am gone. that girl only exists in photos now. and i miss the boy who quotes me musicals and meets my eyes in a clash of hazel vs blue. i miss how we used to email back and forth, our fingers flying over the keys. we would talk about music and i have never found anymore else in this entire universe who understands my music like he does. and i don’t think i could ever find a better friend in the cosmos. but he doesn’t want to be friends with this new version of me. he wants the magical summer girl that i was. and this boy who i had phone conversations with, he doesn’t understand that i am not that girl anymore. he doesn’t understand the coursing gold that runs through my veins which causes me to shift and mold into new versions of myself. after all he will always be the boy who make me feel lightning sparks at my fingertips, the boy who whispered song lyrics into the phone speaker, and the boy who has never stopped messaging me. he has not changed. and i don’t think that he will. he is as unchanging as a metamorphic girl. and for one magical summer i contained my change inside of my skin and held in the need to shake off people and things. but the magical summer ended and then i wasn’t a girl who had freckled legs tanned by the sun. i was a girl who to pose for a id picture and a girl who couldn’t hold her sharp edges inside of her skin anymore. and so i changed. and i know he keeps calling and messaging. and i know he doesn’t understand why i don’t reply back. but a sticky acidic ball forms in my throat when i see those messages. and my heart throbs, because it is raw. and because a boy with hazel eyes with always have half. i say i’ve not felt love before. but maybe i have. all i know is that there once was boy with hazel eyes who made me, a lightning bolt of a girl, unchanging and nondestructive for a minute. and that minute was the best minute of my entire life. but a minute is only 60 seconds, and after that i am a streaking girl again. and he will always be my target. i’ve felt butterflies and i’ve felt tears trickle down my cheeks when i realize he doesn’t want me anymore. i’ve tried to tell all my friends who say we were perfect. and they just don’t understand. how can you not be the same person you were this summer, they ask. and i can’t tell them. all i know is that when he says our joke and calls me by the name only he has ever said, my heart burns. and it hurts. because it knows that he has half. and i don’t know when i will ever get it back. because i don’t know if he is my first love, because i have fallen in love before. i have fallen in love with poetry, the way my little brother smiles, and the way the sand feels against the bottom of my feet. but he, he was my summer love. my magical hazel eyed boy. and i believe in him as much as i believe in harry potter, the boy lived. i am just afraid that if i hit the reply button, my hazel eyed boy won’t live. because i am a lightning bolt, an ever shifting beam of power. and he, is the steadiest atom-composed thing in the universe. and for one amazing summer i called him mine.