The sun starts to set behind you. You can almost feel the warm embrace of the orange sky glow if only it wasn’t overpowered by the constant wind and dust rushing throughout your skin as you ride your motorscooter home.
The town seems more compact than the last you saw of it. All the various houses and convenience stores and coffee shops are neatly placed close to each other as they make two ever-stretching walls of concrete on either side of the road. You’ve seen crowded infrastructure before, in the cities where chaotic urban buildings fight to control the length of the sidewalk, creating a sense of disorganization and confusion. But it’s different this time, you don’t feel enclosed but more… protected.
Perhaps you’re biased, you did spend your childhood here after all. If you could call 3 years a childhood. That rush of nostalgia seeps through your eyes as memories flood your mind. “That’s where we went kite flying!”, “That’s my old teacher’s home!”, “That’s my old school!”, you excitedly but discreetly point out various moments you had in your mind like a child showing their favorite toys to their friends.
You felt safe here, didn’t you? The town feels so isolated from the rest of the world… from the rest of your past. You didn’t have to worry about anything but just being a kid… just a normal kid. You wish you could go back to the time when there was no world out there. When there was nothing on your mind but what you were going to play next. But now you’ve grown taller, you can see above the concrete walls, over to the trees behind and the world beyond them. This town has become too small for you now.
But it wasn’t all that good, was it now? Your family here wasn’t that good, it never was and never will be. Your fragile little mind has chosen to cherry-pick these pleasant times and placed them on pedestals, towering over the empty spaces of your past. But now, you’ve grown taller than these pillars, too tall to not realize that they were never that grand in the first place.
But it’s fine, isn’t it? Even though you can feel life gets duller and more repetitive here, even though you see your family members grow tired of your presence, even though you can feel the sugarcoat you placed on these past years unfold slowly every second, even if so… it’s still your childhood, right? It’s still beautiful, right? It meant something… right?
The sun had set. You’ve arrived. Veiled by blue undertones cast by the cold and dark night, the house still stands, for now… until when?