County Road 4

That morning I drove it in reverse, back into town, a faint light already on the horizon, all four windows down, cool misty summer air keeping me awake, making me alive. I knew, somehow, all of this couldn’t last.

Before we saw the house we heard the bass: bumping, rumbling, echoing across the country fields and into our depths. We turned off onto a gravel drive and, after cresting a hill, came to Juan’s uncle’s lakeside house.

It was night, and through open windows we could see the furniture still being cleared from a large room to make a dance floor. But it was clear from the surprising number of cars parked along the grassy verge : this party was well underway, and everyone was there, and it was going to be a wild one.

I don’t mean booze, sex and drugs. There was probably a bit of that there, but my high school really didn’t roll like that. What ensued that night was a high more fundamental than what substances will give, one maybe more like sex: it was the wild abandon of giving in completely to the moment.

We gave in to the insufferable summer heat, shirts sticking to our backs and then eventually being tossed aside as a thunderstorm ruptured the night and the dancing mob took to the terrace to feel the cool relief of the deluge.

We gave in to each other, any remaining social barriers in our small and recently graduated class now dissolved as we began one final summer together before we would all leave town and this world we knew would cease to be.

We gave in to the Colombian music, the profound bass seeming to want to set all our heartbeats as one.

The night was a joyous blur.

Many hours later we found our way back to County Road 4, which leaves town heading west into rolling hills and forest-ringed lakes: the youthful playgrounds of summer where I grew up.

That morning I drove it in reverse, back into town, a faint light already on the horizon, all four windows down, cool misty summer air keeping me awake, making me alive.

I knew, somehow, all of this couldn’t last. This peace, this freedom, that we’d all found together: it wasn’t a solid state. It was a gorgeous glittering gas, a galaxy. It was a temporary truce between ourselves and the life that lay ahead.

The truce would fail. Life would win.

We who were a single sweaty dancing mass a few hours earlier would soon leave home for good and scatter to the far corners of the world to figure out who we would become, some beings other than these beautiful young things who for once summer finally resolved to be in harmony with each other and within ourselves.

We would, in short, become adults. And some of us, the bright and curious ones especially, would never return to this city, until many years later when some baby would be born, or a relative would die, and we’d discover that we are foreigners in a place that no longer knows who we are.

So it was best that night to just keep going.

Turn the music up. Stick a hand out the window, feel the cool fresh country air, feel this life which flies by too fast.