Smoke slowly spiraled up to oblivion as I sat on the curb that night. My third cigarette, and it was time to go back to work,  back to wishing and wondering and waiting for day's end.  I clung to my phone as the bitter wind nudged my mind down the street and around the corner and to your door. Wanted to call you. Didn't. Wanted to tell you everything. Couldn't.
    It had been a while since I'd been able to see the beauty in my life. I was used to chronic happiness, used to nothing being able to bring me down. But for some reason, lately, tiny little unrealistic daydreams had been creeping like relentless picnic ants into my ears and through to my brain and stopping my smiles dead in their toothy tracks, and mentholated inhalations seemed the only way to temporarily ward them off. I was stuck. I wanted so many things, and for the first time, I felt I couldn't have any of them, no matter how many shooting stars passed overhead, no matter how many ladybugs decided to grace my lapels. I wanted somebody to hold my hand and guide me through the labyrinth of secrets and crushed dreams I'd found myself in, past the drunken tattoos in unfinished basements and bathroom sink hair color experiments and sad songs on repeat, to a field of sunflowers, towering over my head. I wanted to wander aimlessly, to play in the shadows cast through the swaying petals, to be carefree, to be weightless. I wanted to lay in the grass and watch the flowers vibrate against the sky, the greens and yellows and blues all unnaturally oversaturated. But at 18, I was taller than any sunflower I'd ever seen.
    I lit another cigarette in a fiery fuck you to corporate time constraints and tried to figure out what exactly I felt I was missing in my life. And truth be told, the only thing I could come up with was home. I hadn't really felt at home nearly anywhere for years-- not at my parents' house, or friends' houses, or in college. So I yearned for some imaginary place, some city where it was always the magic hour and the sun reflected off of sky-high windowpanes of vaguely different buildings and cast a cantaloupe glow on the dirty streets below. Somewhere I could dance through the streets and sing Imagine and hand people peace signs made of daisies and nobody would think twice, and dandelions grew in the cracks of the sidewalk, and everything smelled vaguely of honeydew. And nobody would ever end their lives. Nobody would ever have to gather the frayed ends of their existence into a final knotted sigh. And I could think on paper. And I would never, ever have days like I was having then, days in which I was the last piece to be placed in the center of a jigsaw puzzle, but somebody's toddler had chewed on the edges, and a little piece of me was missing, so the puzzle could never be finished.
    I rose from the curb, brushing away tiny pebbles and bits of dried leaves that clung to the fabric of my skirt.. As I turned towards the door, I saw a middle-aged man in a smart suit and subtly patterned tie hurtling out of the store, the produce and loaves of bread in his cart jumping and jostling with every elongated step. A few peaches made their way from a bag struggling to contain bananas and artichokes and kiwis and rolled freely around the cart, but the man kept running. I thought, is his wife going into labor? Did his stocks just crash? Is there a baseball game on tonight? He neared the steep part of the parking lot, the section that was absolute hell in the winter, when scrawny teenaged boys struggled against the icy incline to push snow-covered metal contraptions to create dangerous puddles on the floor inside. But he didn't slow; in fact, he picked up speed, until at the cusp of the hill, he jumped onto the bar supporting the bottom rack of the cart and rode it like a chariot down the incline, tie thrown over his shoulder, carefree, weightless.  Alive.
    We talked once about how we were as children. I didn't have much to say-- I lied a lot, screamed a lot, manipulated people beyond the capabilities of the average youngster. You told me about how you wanted to be a vampire, so you could live forever. You'd hang upside-down in trees, swinging by your knees, until a hapless victim ambled past, at which time you'd swoop down and bite them. "Not too hard," you told me. "Just hard enough to feel powerful. Freak people out a bit. I didn't need their friendship to be okay," you laughed. "I just needed their blood." And you told me your skinned knees and shrunken sweaters and mudpie experiments and dusks and summers. And I told you we should get married. I wasn't surprised when you laughed, but a tiny part of me hoped you wouldn't. A tiny part of me wanted you to find me a field of six and a half foot tall sunflowers. I wanted you to find me that imaginary city with the perpetually setting sun. I wanted you to show me how to finally just breathe, because everything was just as great as it ever had been or would be, because I was alive and my heart was beating in time to the rhythm of the pulsing planet. And I didn't need anything else, there in that moment, than the thought that you'd never stop looking at me like you were just then.