Three beers, five cigarettes, and a revelation of sorts

We sat on the beach long after the families had left.
Plastic buckets lay overturned near the shore,
and tiny abandoned kingdoms
still held the shape of small hands.

Your sandals were somewhere behind us,
and mine kept filling with sand.

You lit a cigarette
and held it between your fingers
as we watched the tide drag things back with it.

“Do you remember,” you said,
“how badly we wanted to grow up?”

I laughed, thinking about how
I would probably still have been running to the shore,
letting the waves touch my ankles
before running breathless back to the mat,
if it hadn’t been for the exhaustion.

I told you
I had used to think adulthood would feel taller,
and you dug your thumb into the neck of the beer bottle,
peeling at the damp label slowly.

The sky had already begun losing its colour
as we watched a father lift his sleeping son
from the sand without waking him.
We smiled at how easily children trusted gravity around adults.

For a moment,
I thought about every version of myself that I had lost at once.
No more school shoes drying near the balcony.
No more coins pressed into my palm for ice cream.
No longer the certainty that I would be looked after without ever asking for it.

The cigarette ash fell unnoticed onto your jeans.
I leaned back on my elbows
as we briefly caught the moon
in the silver ring near my thumb.