Tesseract with me

There is just something about summer nights; the lingering smell of leftover sunscreen and sweat, a certain carefree vibe; the way lights react against the night sky, making it never feel as late as it may be. I may never understand it, but I love that certain days when it is nice and hot, there is a certain smell in the air that take me back to one summer in particular. A summer when I made casual decisions that would affect the whole course of my live with no further thought than whether or not it was my turn to run to the store. It was a whole summer of sitting in a cramped little room filled with cigarette smoke and musical equipment for hours each night for their band to practice. As they would play the same songs over and over, just to tweak little things here and there, the hazy air would take on a dreamy quality that I fear I will never be able to fully justify with words. I spent hours sitting in a folding metal chair drawing while the music wove itself into my subconscious, forever becoming a part of me. The days seemed endless and the future held nothing but hope and promise.

Certain smells make me laugh as the memories they trigger are of situations and smells that I found quite odd and unremarkable at the time - the right combination of junk food wrappers, cigarette butts, and almost-empty 40′s. Certain skinny-geek-band-boy types that make me giggle to myself as they remind me of the live-in band members that had to be chased out of the girls bathroom as it was always cleaner than the boys bathroom. Seeing groups of kids just standing around with no sense of purpose in that moment remind me of the hot, sticky nights when everyone would head outside for a break and stand around playing with a hacky-sack in the narrow driveway between the building and the train-track. Certain strains of music still make me freeze, as though I am hearing the haunting sound from days gone by that can’t possibly exist today, and I am instantly transported back to my eighteen year old self, and in that moment, I am invincible.