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Batter Up

It is dusk, and a faint sliver moon is awakening in a clear sky. In the distance, children are hunting fireflies, and embarking on the start of summer vacation as only children can do. Sounds of balls hurtling through air that is sparked with possibility, echo across the ball field.
I am on the precipice of 16, the future not yet etched into my skin, invincibility in my every breath.When he stands up to bat, tiny hairs on my arms stand up, and a sport that was once not even a thought in my mind, is suddenly all that exists in the moment. He has baseball arms, and baseball arms seem like home. He looks up in the stands, and his mother waves, thinking he is looking at her, but I know that it is I he seeks. When the ball connects with the bat, the sound fills the space of the world.
Nearly two decades later, the smell of the cut grass at the field is enough to erase the minivan, the extra pounds from numerous pregnancies, the laugh lines, the mortgage and the knot of stress that rests itself perpetually inside my gut. The teenage girl emerges, full of hope, and a belief that sitting in bleachers with a dehydrated hot dog is life itself.
Guns n Roses croons on the radio about a Paradise City, and because these memories have taken hold, Wynantskill has become said city. It is easy to forget about acne, and bad teachers. I can overlook homework and ugly semi-formal dresses. I am convinced that early 90s fashion was timeless and not at all silly and arbitrary. It is Paradise City because my youth, and my passion and my vhemence is all encompassing. My heart is yet to be scarred by repeated shattering, my idea of chaos is cramming for midterms, and no one I adore has died and left me alone.
When I have passed the fields, and the song has ended, I have an indelible mark in my hand. It vaguely resembles that of another hand, a hand at the end of an arm, a baseball arm. A hand that has long since grown and become a different hand, but whose mark will always remind me of a time when baseball equaled beauty and the best place for hunting fireflies was paradise city.

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