Glorified high ✓

I

Sometimes I long for those days.

The background noise of the breathing city coming through your window, rattling sound of circling blades of the fan that didn't help much in the summer heat, the deep rumble of your voice when you were killed in a video game; they are the soundtrack of my life that is on repeat even when I desperately keep pressing pause.

The haunting shine of your eyes baking in the glory of a massive neon sign, the contrast of black ink on the paleness of your skin, the purple love bite on your neck that you proudly wore instead of a cross necklace; these are the colours that I use to paint the walls of every place I move in and call home.

The sweetness of smoke you exhaled in my begging mouth, the burnt smell of toast you made but never ate because you were hungrier for my lips, the scent of you on my palm; they are the oxygen I still need to survive.

Is it just nostalgia? I would like to define this feeling once and for all so I could at least find a doctor, a shaman, a medicine, a self-help book to get rid of it.

I'm good where I am, I truly am. I'm better anywhere else in the world but there in that city of fallen youth where hours or minutes seemed arbitrary, days pouring into nothing like there were no clocks, no watches. Even though I'm older now, I make sure to never put roots down in one place, always going, never stopping, afraid that one city's demons will drag me down again.

I'm trying to let you go and remember you at the same time.

Sometimes I can only see you in my dreams; time has helped me with my effort to forget those beautiful features, young and perfectly proportioned and I'm grateful that the only photograph that I have of you doesn't even show your face. The truth is that most of the time I just want to forget that you even existed. The other times, without warning, I simply see you, hear you, smell you everywhere. Anywhere.

Déjà vu. Glitch in the brain. A twitch of a muscle. As if you are an integral part of my atmosphere, as if you are in particles of the light shining on me.

Endless summer, you promised.

A year in a life is so insignificant if you think about it, I've learned how not to dwell because I've gained nothing and lost everything in that year. Well, I didn't lose my life, so I guess something good came out of it.  Even though I'm still walking alone through this world, I still feel that I was lucky to have a moment of belonging to someone and that thought will keep me going through a lifetime of loneliness.

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I lived in a town that was on the river bank - wide, slow-moving river, murky and dark that held secrets on the bottom, ships sailing to unknown destinations that I always wondered about.

It seemed that I just always had a thing for darkness and unknown because there is no other way to explain why everything happened the way it did - no broken and violent home, no bullying at school, I wasn't depressed growing up. I guess my life then was just ordinary. An only child of hard-working parents, I spent my childhood days kicking football on the streets with other neighbourhood kids and my adolescent days listening to Nirvana and skipping class in order to smoke weed behind the school with my friends. I was never popular but I wasn't invisible either - I knew the cool kids, I was good at sports and I was relatively smart but too lazy to push for better grades. And I liked it that way because I never cared enough to make a mark or settle down in that place. There was something else out there waiting for me.

At eighteen years old I was about to start my first year studying journalism and modern languages. My parents helped me find a room to rent in the city, it was a shared apartment that was advertised by another boy a year older from the same university, and I packed my suitcase with enthusiasm.

I smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of my town pass, my parent's car driving me away to the big city where my university was. Everything seemed scrubbed clean of my presence already, it was so easy to leave it all behind.

Some people need to leave home to find their home.