I remember a conversation I had with a girlfriend once.

“Sometimes I really do believe I’m a time traveler”

“Yeah?”

The air was crisp- the perfect balance for the wind to hit your skin with just the right amount of heat while the air sucked into your lungs drew slightly cold. The ground was wet, stifling the sound of the orange leaves crunching under our feet.

The neighborhood she lived in held a special kind of charm. They were a polite kind of wealthy. The houses were quaint- small enough to avoid assumptions, but just subtly littered with signs of their status. The specific shade of gray of the wall, the landscaper installing their newest addition to their yard: the fountain, and the myriad of luxury cars that the common eye couldn’t identify.

Most of its charm, though, came from the trees. They spanned long and wide, littering the neighborhood with bright spurts of yellow and orange to contrast the decaying brown and green. This little corner of the world hadn’t fully faced the force of the coldness that fills neighborhoods today- with their open air and unspoken three tree per one mile radius rule. The wind that blows through those neighborhoods runs extra cold, picking up little traces of cookie-cutter-house misery along the way.

I found a great deal of comfort in our night time commutes. The trees cloaked us from the city, allowing us the beauty of the sparse stars just bright enough to shine through the screaming city lights. Even the lights were warmer. The lampposts hung lower, emitting an orange light that starkly contrasted the industrialized feeling of the lights outside my apartment in the city. Everything in this neighborhood moved slower, like the last hug you get from your grandma before drifting away.

“If I close my eyes hard enough, it’s like I’m right back there”

she didn’t know it yet, but I possessed a special kind of superpower.

“what do you mean”

“If I think about it hard enough, and I squeeze my eyes tight, it’s like I go back in time. I can talk to past versions of myself- sometimes I even like to step into a memory and change the outcome”

she let out a soft chuckle

“that would make a really good premise for a short film”

and I smiled. I knew that was her way of acknowledging me and bridging a world between our varying degrees of creativity. I knew she was listening, but still, we moved on

Though, sometimes it feels like only she got to move forward, and I’m stuck in this never ending loop of a memory, lost in the trance of the warmth of a streetlight.