Dress

I'm wearing the same dress I wore last year, on an evening that felt like moonlight even though the sky was still a milky purple-blue by the time we left, arms linked, laughter spilling over each other and turning the air fragrant, because back then we still thought we could conjure honey from our lips, our limbs. I'm wearing the dress I wore last time the trees were green and the grass smelled like fresh lawnmower and hope creeping up my legs, and I'm wearing the same heels that glinted golden in the dwindling sunlight, that looked like a combination of all of theirs, if you squinted this way and that, maybe we were all the same,

 just girls with hair products and lip oil that stung but that we pretended made us beautiful, girls who carried vaseline and whispered rumors like shields, girls who had no purpose but right then, that night when everything meant something, even the blossoms falling from the trees, goodbye they go, spring caving to summer, endless river. At least it did to me, but maybe the rest of them didn't find poetry in the way we held hands and danced like we were all helplessly in love as the heat of the day melted away, maybe the rest of them didn't feel that we were finally grown-up and finally beautiful, our smiles crooked because we knew everything, not because we knew nothing. Maybe I was the only one who heard something beyond the bad music, saw something beyond the circles of girls and herd of boys, beyond even that one boy whose blue eyes I never stopped thinking about until finally in january I forgot about them. Maybe I was the only one who thought crying in the bathroom sounded like song, that the way we held each other couldn't be blown away like the wind is blowing my dress right now, letting it swish around my legs, letting me remember how it felt to think I was beautiful.