I remember after the rain.
The field turned heavy and green.
Baseball cleats sank deeper into soft ground,
like the earth had been listening the whole time.
I was a boy then.
Too loud inside my own body.
I beat my chest at the dawn,
like it owed me something.
Screamed into wet air,
just to hear it come back different.
We were always chasing something:
thunder,
butterflies,
a ball skimming past second base,
like it meant escape instead of a game.
Ten years old, maybe less.
Knees always scabbed up.
Freckles burning through summer sun.
I remember running those fields,
like they didn’t end anywhere real.
In the dugout I pulled my cap down hard,
chewed bubble gum until it lost its taste,
waiting for my turn at bat,
dreaming like it meant something permanent.
Pocketknife afternoons.
Sticks carved into arrows,
aimed at a moon that never moved closer,
no matter how many times we tried.
After the rain, everything felt possible.
Even mistakes looked clean for a while.
Even silence had space in it.
Now I think about it different.
How the same rain that stopped the game
fed everything that grew after.
How it always did both things at once:
ended something,
started something else.
I don’t know when it happened,
but I stopped running barefoot
toward anything that looked like forever.
Sometimes, when wet grass comes back to me,
I still see him out there,
that boy in the open field,
not knowing how fast it goes.
