It's the summer of 2017.
I'm in the backseat of a dinky blue Saturn SUV, the windows are down, and the balmy Carolina air sweeps lovingly across my cheeks and creeps up under the sweaty bandanna pushing back my kinky, dark curls. Grant - one of his gangly, pale, freckled arms hanging bent out of the driver's window - is enjoying the breeze just as contently. His hair is long and luscious and beautiful, and the dying sun paint his round, Lennon-esque glasses in streaks of blushing gold and warm sepia. Beside him in the passenger seat, Anton - broad-shouldered and kind-faced, his lips skewed in appreciation - is bopping along to the twanging guitar and rasp swelling and receding from the dusty radio like ocean waves.
Ventura Highway, the voices coo, in the sunshine... where the days are longer, the nights are stronger than moonshine...
We're on a winding backroad - of which Huntersville seems primarily composed - and it feels like we'll be young forever, hanging onto the chorus of a song that could last for another two minutes or another two milennia. There is nothing between me and the aether, and my youth is eternal, wrapping around my soul and squeezing tight until there's nothing but the sweet tang of 7/11 cherry ICEE flavoring and untied shoelaces and old, rickety treehouses and itchy grass and rocks that overlook lakes that stretch on for miles and miles and miles until the end of the world.
Deja, who wasn't there physically but also right there in the backseat beside me, rocking her huge fro back and forth like some sort of otherwordly Black goddess, smelled like face masks and tea tree oil and her mom's sage and magic and movie marathons and popcorn and cereal propped up on our chests at the earliest hours of morning and latest hours of night.
We have nowhere to be. We have everywhere to be.
I'm in my room, now; two years later, that familiar guitar riff spills from my speaker and it's like that summer never ended.
It's still here. Breathing.
Comments
Post a Comment