I have to preserve these feelings

Jose helping me with my Spanish homework, our legs under the tablecloth, heating from the calefacción. The dim light and sitting in it. Listening to the Beatles and him making me sing. The intro to Across the Universe, Jose messing up. Hugging him for the first and last time, telling me this wouldn't be the last time, to meet him someday in England. Eating sour gummies as tapas, drinking cocacola, playing jenga with Alicia. Coming home intoxicated with beer, and hungry, laughing and hiccuping with Maria, Maria laughing at me, sitting in the dim light, under the lamp beside her couch where she'd sit with the laptop on her lap.

When I'd learn songs on the piano and create new ones. All I remember of my senior year of high school are the nights, when I was given roses for the first time, not for a birthday or graduation, but for love. I remember sitting by dark windows and playing music, discovering a piano and playing for the first time and knowing. I remember an arm around me, a chin on my shoulder as I played Moonlight Sonata. A black cat on the stairs. I remember darkness, but falling in premature love in it.

Mosquitoes at the bend of our sticky knees. A field behind the Starbucks. Saganaki. Reading Plato's Meno and saving myself from Salvation.

Discovering folk music in Roosevelt's library, eyes stinging from dust, the library darkening, someone pulls the pull chain and there's rich light.