Talk About a Flashback...

For Thena and Aphrie. Perhaps, someday, with this lucid hindsight, we'll make sense of this:

Summer after ninth grade. Weather's hotter than the pits of hell. We're still in that "walk everywhere" phase of life, so we're walking, naturally, along the busy road that flows just beyond my house.

The convenience store is just a block away, and we're determined to be outside as much as possible today. In the open air. On display for the entire world, so they won't miss us somehow.

"They'll come. I'm sure they will. They have to come. They promised..." I smile and nod, trying to believe your words with every fiber of my being.

We spent two whole nights together, the three of us, just to be sure that we wouldn't miss a single moment of that sacred day. First midnight to the next midnight, we hoped and prayed that our insights weren't wrong.

But they never came. Neither of them showed. We wore the colors that we'd said we'd wear and even did our hair despite the wretched heat, but there was no tangible sign of the two who'd promised to arrive that day.

Disappointment was a cloudy daze. None of us could see through the mist that now shrouded over us, and our wildest dreams began to unravel.

But you guys and me, well, we weren't going to give in that easily. The summer ended, as summers always do, and the fall soon rolled into view. We dreaded the start of school--not because of what would begin, but because of the adventures we knew would end.

September brought about a fresh wave of unfulfilled hopes. They never showed, again. They'd swore up and down that they would come in some way...

March, too, proved to us that all dreams must die. And yet, we still believe we're right. The world doesn't know what we've done, what we've seen and felt and touched--it can't be us who are wrong. It's all of them.

The last shred of proof that I will hold on to is that we know they're here. Every chill, every bizarre feeling, every violent dream that merges with reality--it's all part of this. It is this.

We have to learn to live in this new world, full of contradicting facts and baffling coincidences. Puzzles always make sense until they're torn apart, don't they? Maybe we just need to realign the pieces.

Maybe it's just as simple as opening one more door. One more midnight. One more dream.

Maybe.