Over the summer, whenever I went on Facebook and scrolled through posts, I kept seeing an album of photos titled Feelin Lit, Feelin Light, 2 am Summer Night that one of my friends had made. Whenever I read those words, I thought, “That is summer! If I had to describe summer, those are the words I would say.”
“Could you pause it?” As the video game music fades, I get up and walk to the screen door to let the cat in. As I approach the door, I can hear the crickets chirping and see fireflies twisting through the pine trees. It’s a lovely summer night, and my friends and I are inside playing video games. I appreciate the silence that the departed college students have left behind.
“You guys want to go outside?”
“It’s, like, two in the morning”, they say.
“So?”
“Well, it’s dark”, they say.
“We can play in the street light,” I say in frustration.
“We’ll be all alone,” they say.
“My mom can come out too!”
“What will we do?”
I think. My eyes light upon a piece of chalk. “Foursquare,” I say. I grab the green kickball and the bucket of chalk. We skip down to the street light which is situated on a steep hill. I take a piece of chalk and draw the squares.
We start to play and the atmosphere suddenly goes from skeptical to cheerful. We all laugh every time the ball flies down the hill and somebody tries to scramble after it. After a while people start to walk past us. Hoodied and quiet they walk by us without a second glance. We stop and stare at them every time one walks past. They sort of creep us out. It becomes evident that they are just walking in a state of oblivion. They’re just zombies. They don’t see us, hear us, or even acknowledge us. The cat comes out and joins us, sitting beneath a tree in the shadows, presiding over our game. Categories start, colors, names, movies and actors. We laugh when someone throws out a made-up name like “Cooookey.” When it’s my turn to chose, I always choose my specialty, countries. A loud groan ensues and I laugh.
As we get into an argument about whether you should call it Myanmar or Burma, I tune them out and smile. I smile because its summer and its 3:30 in the morning and I feel like this moment could last forever.
We go inside and continue playing video games until eight in the morning. When we finally go to sleep, its after the controllers fall out of our hands and we collapse to ground.
It was my first all-nighter, July 29th. Even after the sun had risen, I still felt lit, I still felt light, I still felt that 2 AM summer night.