Her eyes glimmered like green marbles rolling across a classroom floor.

It was a memory that left me bruised – like the knees under her socks, which were covered in scrapes from blissfully playful and carefree ignorance; those first few strikes of exposure to the outside world. Her cracked lips smiled at me awkwardly from a distance across the fence, pushing her cheeks into dimples with sleep still in her eyes mid-afternoon. She pulled her socks over her knees and ran away.

One must have no regret for inaction. Alas, good things do not come to those who wait, as what we wait for, often only exists as a glimmer of light in the past. A passing moment, illusion of a ghost in shadow which disappears with the flicker in a matchstick. A memory of a past, which once materialized expires – the sweetness, which once described on paper, rolls to the back of the tongue that can only taste bitter, where it is no longer recognized, but undesirably makes us grow fat; a materialization of our guilt which piles on for everybody to see. The baggage under our eyelids and behind our backs, the baggage we only see once we must move on.