When I miss Ohio,

I miss sprinklers ticking like a metronome for my dining room piano playing late into the night while my brother shows me his new colored pencil artwork and my sister sings in the shower.  I miss the walls with familiar scrapes and scuffs caused by years of being alive and being a child.  I miss cartoons running on marathon, eating cereal with chocolate syrup just for the hell of it, laying on the trampoline or in a tent reading my favorite books and talking on the phone that still had a cord, to a friend from school because our moms arranged the call.  I miss the smell of the yard, even the dog shit and the neighbor's pesticide.  I miss the firetrucks and the ice cream guy, and the salt that left neat little bulletholes in the new fallen snow.  I miss dancing in my bedroom with my sister while we try on antique wigs and glasses from my dad's wardrobe.  I miss studios and the smell of permanent markers all over my clothes, spraypaint on my new glasses and trying a cigarette for the first time before they started tasting like shit.  Beer, doubly so.  I miss Mo my favorite pug dog ever, barking at deer.  I miss sleeping til noon with a flu watching back to the future and my mom bringing me in alphabet soup and the wind blowing through into my bowlcut hair, sick but happy, alive and interested.

I am still the same kid.

I just miss a lot more.