A Summer Like No Other.

High school was two years ago. Through the haze of pot smoke and alcohol fumes we’d made it out of that place and had no idea that the summer ahead would change some of us forever. At days we smoked and drank beer and at nights we smoked and drank some more. But it was the nights that were beautiful. Someone would sneak out their dad’s car and we’d move through the city, the lights from tall buildings flashing across our glazed eyes as we made our way through the city’s veins. We’d go to abandoned parking lots, old buildings, and lake sides where others like us hung out. People our age, doing these we did. There were the wannabe hippies, the wannabe gangsters, the wannabe models, and then there were the ones who didn’t really want to be anything. It was hard to judge which kind was worse, but that wasn’t a problem because no one really cared. I met a girl in a place like that once and she told me she wanted to groom horses for a living and write a book about them. I liked her. She had the familiar glassy look in her eyes and she smiled easy. she also had cuts on her arm, some of them fresh. she said when she liked how it felt when she bled herself. I never asked her name or number and i never saw her again, but i can smell her hair on cloudy days and how it felt on my neck as our bodies moved in divine rhythm in a smelly washroom at the back of the abandoned stadium. We laughed a lot that summer, and it wasn’t entirely the pot’s fault. We laughed because we were there. A part of a generation that would fade into oblivion just like every other but in that moment we were there. And we lived, and we loved and we laughed and we didn’t care about much. By the end of that summer some  would leave, to college, to places, and some would stay. Some of us still meet when i go home and we laugh and we love and we live but there’s something left behind. Something that had to go, something we were stupid enough to think would last forever. We don’t talk about it but we see it in each other’s eyes as we say our goodbyes and go back to our lives and to our devices. I still think of that summer. Those uneventful 2 months that somehow changed our lives. But we don’t talk about it.