Cecilia Lee

West Side Barbecue smells, shockingly, like barbecue. A staple of my childhood, I always ordered kids’ sliders there — one with cheese and out without, please. Sweet potato fries. Or maybe a corn muffin. When my grandparents came to visit, we went there. On the first warm nights of spring in elementary school, my parents and I walked there (I protested the entire 20 minutes), and throughout high school, my friends and I commemorated particularly happy tennis practices with dinner at the uneven metal tables outside. I drive by West Side nearly every day during the summer, remembering the Pacific Cooler CapriSuns I pulled from the fridge inside, shelved alongside Jarritos and Coca-Cola, and I can’t imagine returning there after I’ve left Worcester… It feels impossible to separate my childhood from its warm wooden walls. My adult self will never have a true place there. West Side belongs to a younger me, watching the sun set over the street and thinking about the science homework I have due the next day.

While writing this, I’ve been listening to music. “How to disappear” by Lana Del Ray just came on. Slow, sad, soft, beautiful, I listened to it a lot at the end of high school with my friends. One evening, in late May or early June, we drove downtown and, I don’t remember how, but we ended up on a rooftop parking lot, armed with only our volleyball and ourselves, in the fading light. We sprinted, raced around the empty lot, tried our best to keep the volleyball up (and inevitably panicked when we dropped it and it rolled off towards the edge of the roof), danced when songs like “How to disappear” came on. Around us, the sky, clear and endless, inched closer to darkness. First it was tinged with pink and orange, then purple, and as the lights flicked on in the apartment buildings around us, as the hills surrounding Worcester were swallowed by oncoming darkness, night began to set. We sat in a little circle on the ground, listening to our music, and allowed the sky to wash over us.

Throughout the summer, my friends and I went for late-night drives on the backroads just outside the city limits. The road rolled gently up and down; our headlights caught the edge of the trees, ghostly and thin, and illuminated the double yellow line on the pavement, which extends infinitely into the darkness. On one of those summer nights, “Life in a Northern Town,” a song from when my mom was in high school, played from the speakers, its chorus rhythmic and faintly haunting. Fog rose from the asphalt in front of the car last summer and I felt the warm cloak of a humid night. There were no walls around us, but instead of feeling free, I was lost. Part of me wanted to make a U-turn now — it would be so, so easy to just go home. We hurtled forward in the dark, only the trees immediately before us illuminated by my lights. I could barely make out the twisty road before me and I tensed in my seat. I can’t see what’s coming, I thought. I can’t see what’s coming. I can’t see what’s coming.

My friends and I criss-crossed Worcester all summer. We bought pints of Ben and Jerry’s from Price Chopper and then crossed the street to Elm Park, dug our plastic spoons into the “Tonight Dough” or “Phish Food,” and ran madly around in the oncoming night trying to keep our volleyball up in the air. On lazy hot afternoons, we sought refuge at Gong Cha, downtown, where the air smelled like sugary tapioca and K-pop played a little too loudly over the speakers. Any free afternoon was an opportunity to escape the dull metronome of life at home. It was new, this exploration of the city practically without curfews and rules — our parents didn’t really care when we got back — and yet it was the same as always. I remembered playing at Elm Park as a preschooler. And for years, my friends and I had been going to Gong Cha after-school, carefully avoiding eye contact with middle school ex-classmates. We still avoided them. And so this criss-crossing — movie nights, short hikes only 20 minutes away, Chipotle runs — became a metronome itself. We ping-ponged around the city. And with every tick, tick, tick I ached to break free.

In August, my parents and I went to New Hampshire. We spent time with my grandparents, who spend every summer there in their creaky, cracking white house. Each day, when we brought lunch down to the little beach club at the pond, we sat at the same picnic benches with the same family friends as always. I ran down the dock, my footsteps thrumming against the wood, just like I had for years — I dove into the cool depths, water up my nose per usual. Nothing changes in New Hampshire, and though it comforts me to know that the road from the lake to our house will always be steep and winding, that the farm stand on Loudon Ridge will always sell cucumbers and squash and carrots that taste different from anything I can buy in the grocery store, I find it unsettling. Out-of-time. Unreal. At those picnic tables by the lake or at my grandparents’ house for dinner, where classical music perennials warbles from the radio, I could easily speak of the upcoming fall in hypotheticals. “When I leave” — as if I would actually leave. “Looking for classes” — as though I searched high and low for them. Why not just stay in New Hampshire forever, lulled to sleep by the crickets and cicadas chirping from the grass below my window? Under the blanket of trees and stars, no time would pass.