All our dreams fell dead silent in that town.
The banners they hung on the outside of the school were mazes of names you only recognized from yearbooks. The graduating class of dreams they taught us to dream and pills they didn’t know we were popping.
Summers in that town were our only freedom. It was a feeling we could never get back. It existed within the three minutes of a song you only heard on the radio once, and my mind went through it like a movie. All the scraped knees and parking lots at 12 AM, how we never felt tired. Lying on the hot pavement outside school right before summer hit, the sun hot on our warm skin and cold hearts. Sweatshirts dripping off our shoulders like they were molded to us. We would watch airplanes cross the sky like stars, and watch pink sunrises. We savored cool air on the Fourth of July, the fireworks all around us like small explosions. We would hold sparklers in our hands, burning like we were gods. It was all effect of the overwhelming feeling of summer when the universe felt so big, but if we thought we were gods, we were only ever fooling ourselves.
The universe shrunk in August every year. High school dances and the day we got our drivers licenses, feeling like we could go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. Every feeling like that always passed, and I guess we learned that nothing is forever, that the pressure to be someone someday would crush us flat against the earth and there was nothing we could do about it.
They still hang those banners like we will amount to more than one night stands on prom night and straight-C students. They hang them like we have a chance, like those four years prepared us to be our own individuals, ready for the real world where we no longer had summer to fall back on like a safety net.
We were fooling ourselves into thinking we would never have to go back, we would never have to see it as more than two dimensional. I wanted to look at it, and I wanted it to look less material, but it wasn’t. It was there all around me and I couldn’t pretend it was just a memory when it was staring me straight in the face.
I could feel the pavement on my feet and the light slipping through my fingers. I felt every heavy breath, every stupid decision. I felt the good memories and the bad ones, and when the sun set, the bad memories painted the streets blue and I know the universe is so big, but in that moment, it felt so small.
I never meant to come back here. I meant to leave and forget the good times, the bad times and all the people. They wrote our names on banners, but no one would ever know our names. We weren’t going to go on to write novels or save lives. We were never those kinds of people. We were teenagers telling ourselves that we could get whatever we wanted out of the world.
Standing there, every heart beat was outside of my body. Every heart beat was so heavy it weighed the whole world down, because I had memorized the lines that fell through the blinds and onto my walls. I had known them like they were puzzle pieces I had to put together before I could fall asleep, and I still knew them. I didn’t want to know them, I didn’t want to see my room the way I had left it, I didn’t want to see the banners. We called it home, but I didn’t want it to be. That word expected so much of me, and I tried to swallow it down every time I heard it, but it made the universe shrink again. We say that nothing ever changes, but we’re only fooling ourselves.
We’ve been moving on to bigger things, but they still hang those banners out there like it’s supposed to mean something, like we’re still waiting for summer, and like this place is our home.
We’ve been moving on to bigger things, but I keep looking back on all the days I can never get back. Missed weddings and birthday cards I’d never sent. Maybe that’s why I hated it so much, because I felt small in a place I used to feel so big, because suddenly it hit me that everything had moved on while I was gone.
The universe is so big, but in that moment, it felt so small.