when i was your age

i have started to follow nostalgia instagram pages
which tells me i am on my way to being
seriously old. i am not afraid of it but
more curious what someone can do with 
this kind of longing. i don't want to be a kid
again but i crave portals into those sensations.
the texture the summer used to have.
why did it used to be softer? was it more vivid? 
with my parents, gone all day, my sibling 
& i would eat popsicles & walk to the park. 
i buy a time machine & it doesn't work. i try 
to tell my lover stories but the sounds 
& the colors & the light get stuck
in my words. he tries sometimes to do the same.
he is not as nostalgia-sick as i am though.
my family is like this too. i remember my uncle
telling us over & over about the first time
he went to wildwood or saw a baseball game. 
my dad loves to talk about the summer he went
to arizona with his dad. the quiet & the cactuses. 
at my parent's house i start to tell my sibling, 
"when i was your age..." unironically & i stop myself
embarrassed by my growing impulse to share
something un-sharable. i want to pull them
through a hole in time. show them snow
out a classroom window. fog pouring from the old
school bus as it waits to take us to a yellow tile hallway. 
feeding the turtle her minnows in the backyard kiddie pool. 
they ask what i was going to say & i brush it off.
i think of these hungers like links in a chicken-wire fence.
the way the metal always bends backwards.
tells the next eye, "i am coming home." 
the next time i see my dad i ask if he'll tell me again
about the quiet of the desert flowers.