Our neighborhood is different now without our childhood laughter cascading from the streetlights and bus-stop corners.

Our streets are quiet now, much quieter than they ever were with you.

A new family moved in across the street, a new boy with a new car and a different dog.

They still use your pool, but I haven’t been up the stairs to your backyard in years.

I’ve been sort of friends with him for a while now. Just about the same amount of time we haven’t talked in.

I tell him I could walk through his house with a blindfold on, and he doesn’t believe me, but I know I could.

I picture it sometimes when I stare across the street. Three girls with nothing but freedom and dreams and one great, endless summer stretching out ahead of us.

The flowers in the field sway in the silence. Are they happier now, without our shoeless feet trampling down young saplings on our way to another great adventure? Or do they miss us as much as I do?

Chlorine-dripping hair, a runaway rabbit, and Nerf Gun wars fought in an unfinished basement.

Our front porch lights are dim now, dimmer than they ever were with you.

A new family has moved down the street. A new little girl and boy, almost the same age we were.

They changed your playset. A decade of pencil-carved inscriptions and hidden artifacts is gone. I don’t think about us often, but sometimes, I still pull into my driveway and check to see if your garage doors are open.

A different car resides in them. It has for years, and it almost feels like it belongs. They come to our house to trick-or-treat, and I can see us in their eyes, alight with the glory of being awake on the street past bedtime.

Mower lines cut into a lawn, scratches on elbows and knees, empty spice jars, and a path of logs through the woods.

The echoes of us are beginning to fade.

Street signs shine in your name, and the rain pooled beside our yards reflects the girls we once believed we would always be.

Our voices remain there, preserved in the tin cans we wanted to run like walkie-talkies between our houses. I can still hear us if I listen hard enough to the whispers of ancient wind trapped in our childhoods.

Somewhere, we are still listing off all the things we hope to be, each suggestion seeming more absurd than the last. Our giggles are loud, louder than our words ever were.

A veterinarian, an Olympic gymnast, a zookeeper, a witch, a lost animal detective, a fairy, a teenager.

My neighborhood is warm now. My neighborhood is sunny and bright, full of life and new families. It takes only one glance out my front window to remember how much I love I have for it.

But it is not ours anymore.

The bus stop is different and lonely; none of us have been there in a long time. The woods are left alone to the deer and the birds.

And sometimes, in the aggravating peacefulness of a quiet Sunday afternoon, I can see our young frames running between houses, barefoot with arms piled high with markers and lemonade and imagination, the way we always used to be.