I’m slowly watching every childhood thing from my neighborhood fade away.
The people from what I always called “the blue house” moved away. There’s no more running in circles around the house playing capture the flag, and there’s no more swinging on their swing set.
Slowly, we all started growing up, and we stopped going to the blue house. It went from every day to a few days a week, and suddenly, I never went to the blue house again. Slowly, all of the memories from the blue house started fading away.
I miss playing Just Dance in my neighbor’s basement; I miss scrolling through YouTube until we find the dance that we want. We did those dances so many times that I could still do most of them from memory now.
I miss laying in their kiddie pool doing the “last to leave” challenges that we saw everywhere on YouTube, and I miss jumping on their trampoline for hours at a time. Their house was where I got stung by a bee for the first time, and it’ll always be the place with some of my best childhood memories.
I miss having tea parties in my basement, and I miss looking for fairies in my backyard and at the pond a few minutes away from our houses. I miss pretending our bikes were motorcycles. I miss trying to bike down the huge hill without braking and then trying to make it to the top of my driveway with just the speed from the hill. I remember the first time I made it. I felt so proud of myself, I thought I could do anything.
I miss being out of the house all day, every day. I went from running around the neighborhood to walking around the mall. From watching YouTube with friends to scrolling on my phone alone.
I just miss being a kid.
I wish I could still be a kid running around houses and through my neighbor’s yards. I wish I was still having picnics at Central Woodlands, and I wish we were all still playing sandman on the playground.
It’s sad seeing everything in my neighborhood from when I was younger fade away. I rarely see my neighborhood friends anymore unless we’re at school, and I never see my friends from the blue house. I haven’t even talked to them in years. Now, the blue house has new people in it that I don’t know.
I don’t race my sister down the road to the blue house anymore, and I never will. I haven’t run through the sprinklers that were dispersed throughout the neighborhood, and I haven’t tried to bike down the hill as fast as I can in years.
For the rest of my life, I’m going to look back on the memories of my childhood, but I’ll never get to experience them again.
