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There’s something about the idea of summer that always makes me nostalgic. The heat in the afternoon, the warm breeze at night, I close my eyes and I can make out the outlines of houses. The streetlights emit a dull orange glow, casting blurred shadows that slink along with us. We aren’t really creeping though. Instead, we tend to roam in the summer. I naturally have a fast gait, as if I’m late or very determined, yet something changes in the summer. I become a stroller, a floater more so. Our feet barely graze the ground as we peruse the sleepy little suburb of Hillsboro, looking like the miscreants we could never be.

We pass the elementary school, the neighborhood pool, the random forested areas. We don’t have any agendas or really anything to do, so we keep wandering the streets as if we didn’t walk them our whole lives before cars. We wave at our houses, both the ones we live and lived in, and we spy houses of people we used to know. People that I let go the course of growing into the person I am now. I feel guilt about one Easter egg blue two-story house that now sits uninhabited by its prior owner. The decorative holiday flags have since been taken down. As for an unobtrusive beige one-story? I wonder what happened to that girl.

“She got pregnant and dropped out of high school, I saw her profile picture with her baby.”

We keep strolling. We end up in cars and suddenly we’re in Portland.

My eyes open. I’m back in LA sitting in my small “I’m a college student so I’ll take whatever I can get to live in” house. My mind wonders again, yet instead of night I’m positioned in a picturesque sunset. The sun blinds me seeing as it hits my eye line perfectly, yet I make a pact to apologize to my retinas later so that I can see the colors shift in the sky. This snap shot isn’t recent. It’s a memory my mind is pulling up because the cul-de-sac is my best friends, and she now lives in Portland. I artfully blend my favorite occasions into one memory of that cul-de-sac. I notice that most memories involve food being present in the Hall’s yard. In my minds eye I am chatting with two of my close friends at a makeshift picnic table, but I can’t remember if it’s for the fourth of July or for the celebration of life for my friend’s father’s funeral. I always feel a small sensation of sadness at sunsets.

My eyes come back into focus and I notice that the shafts of light in my room have grown shorter. I look around my messy room and I tell myself I’ll clean in thirty, but instead I know I’m just going to make my dinner instead.