The green notebook went back into the box, its worn spiral binding clicking against the cardboard. The next journal in the stack was different. It wasn’t a cheap supermarket notebook; it was a black, hardcover ledger my mother had bought me for my seventeenth birthday, hoping a serious book would encourage serious thoughts.
It was 1998. The century was ending, and so was our childhood.
I opened it to June. The handwriting had changed again. The frantic, oversized looping of my early teens had compressed into a tight, defensive print. It looked like the writing of someone trying to fit as many words into as little space as possible.
June 14th. The sun didn’t go down until almost nine tonight. We sat on the hood of Denny’s Buick in the grocery store parking lot, just watching the neon sign flicker. Miller says he’s leaving for Chicago in two months. Denny didn't say anything. He just kept throwing a tennis ball against the brick wall. Snap, thud, catch. Over and over. It made my teeth hurt.
I closed my eyes, and the sound returned instantly. Snap, thud, catch.
In the summer of 1998, time stopped being a river and became a countdown. The future, which had spent our entire lives behaving like a vague rumor, had suddenly arrived on our doorsteps in the form of college acceptance letters, apartment leases, and military recruitment brochures. We were seventeen, eighteen, standing on the edge of a high-dive, looking down at a pool we couldn't see the bottom of, pretending we weren't terrified to jump.
We didn't talk about it. To talk about it was to admit it was happening. Instead, we drove.
We burned through gallons of cheap gasoline, circling the perimeter of our small town like night watchmen protecting a border. We listened to the same three compact discs until they skipped on every pothole. We ate late-night fries at the diner where the waitress, a woman named Clara who had seen three generations of teenagers ruin her booths, just refilled our coffee without asking.
I turned the page, the heavy ledger paper turning with a satisfying, solemn weight.
July 19th. Sarah came back for the weekend. Her family is selling the old house on Elm Street. She looks different. She cuts her own hair now, and she smells like cigarettes and expensive soap. We walked down to the creek behind the concrete factory. The fort we built is totally gone, just some rotten wood buried in the weeds. She looked at me and said, 'We really thought we built something permanent, didn't we?' I didn't know what to say. I just held her hand until it got dark.
Reading those words, a dull ache bloomed behind my ribs. Sarah.
That evening by the creek was the last time we were ever just kids. The air had been thick with fireflies and the heavy, humid smell of river mud. When she took my hand, her skin was cool against mine. It wasn't a romantic gesture, not really; it was a rescue line. We were two people drowning in the realization that the places we loved were turning into ghosts right before our eyes.
She left the next morning. I never saw her again. Sometimes I look her up online, seeing glimpses of a life in Seattle—a corporate job, a dog, a smile that looks familiar but belongs to a stranger. The internet allows us to stalk the ghosts of our youth, but it never gives them back.
The last entry of that summer was brief, written on the night before I packed my own trunk for college.
August 28th. Room is empty. Boxes are by the door. Mom is downstairs crying into a dish towel, pretending she’s just doing the dishes. Dad gave me his old socket wrench set. He said, 'A man needs tools.' His hand shook when he handed them over. I want to leave. I want to stay. I don't know how to do both.
I leaned my head back against the sofa, looking at the ceiling. I remembered the socket wrench set. It was still in the trunk of my car, greasy and heavy, twenty-eight years later.
At eighteen, goodbye feels like a funeral. You think you are leaving the world behind. You don't realize yet that you take the whole town with you—the hum of the neon signs, the smell of the garage in winter, the rhythm of a tennis ball hitting a brick wall. It settles into your marrow, shaping the way you walk, the way you love, the way you look at a sunset on a Tuesday afternoon.
I looked at the cardboard box. Only two notebooks left. The sun had dipped below the tree line, leaving the living room in a warm, purple twilight. I reached for the next journal.
