ham and cheese stories.

She sat on the cliff’s edge, worried of the looming depths below. But that villain, fear, did not kidnap her in this moment. Just inches from her body sat the boy, the boy whose voice was a distant memory and yet a comforting guidepost. The soft warm green and white flannel gently clung to his body, matched by the worn through cobalt blue vans sneakers. They rested on a hand-woven Mexican blanket smelling of years of bonfires, s’mores, and laughter. During the anticipation, the boy spoke ham and cheese stories, the ones that have been tasted hundreds of times yet have never become musty or rotten. You might see these stories as simple, you might see this moment as simple, you might see this boy as simple. But this regular boy, with faded sneakers and outdated jeans, represented possibility, a beautiful possibility. She quickly smiled and shifted her gaze from his mystic blue gray eyes onto the displayed explosions of color and fire before them. She longed to be nowhere but here, for here was her textbook independence day.