Step outside and the world is silent, save for the soft buzz from the cicadas.
Eighty-eight percent humidity and seventy-eight degrees. Every single one of those numbers can be felt; they hold real weight. Most who live here stay wrapped in air conditioned comfort, but not you.
You play Trapeze Girl, an upside down pendulum on the swing set. You’ve still got it. A back flip and your shoes touch grass; you walk to the street.
You would have pissed your pants to live here as a child.
The old streets are wide and clear. Homes are bathed in the golden glow that is only possible in Alabama at 7:30 post meridiem. Inside, lights turn on one by one. Outside, street lamps flicker and hum via timer. Too early to be necessary, but orange and pleasant and familiar.
You imagine Child You exploring in the woods, blackberry bushes scratching your shins. Peering around crumbling brick and peeling paint, your head full of romantic notions of earlier occupants. The lingering smell of the poison-spewing vehicle that caused kids to gleefully scream “Bug Man” and run indoors. The games of hide-and-go-seek would have been epic.
You briefly consider asking the other grownups to suspend reality for one moment and to please play with you.
But the sun sets all too fast, and so you don’t. You close your camera and walk back to the house. You hope you hold this feeling, you hope, you hope, you hope.
