Thirty Summers 140 # Claine Keily

I have always lived several lives at once. The sky has always appeared overly wide above me. My doctor told me one day that this was my particular malady, that I knew so well how to be happy, but that I as others had to tend a divergent path in order to feed themselves and tend their shelter and those they loved with money.

I remember being twenty years old and calculating how many days I could survive if I lived the way I wanted. I counted thirty days of living sunlight as starlight, of photographing strangers I had followed through narrow alleyways, of writing their dreams for them, of sleeping without blankets beside the last of the new shorn hay.