One summer morning, during my first summer after college, I drove through the town I grew up in.

I awake around four. My room is dark, but I already know sleep has come and gone. I roll out of bed and throw on a pair of shorts and a white t-shirt. I walk upstairs, stepping lightly, the floor boards creaking beneath me. Opening my back door, the sound of birds chirping grows louder. I step outside.

The morning is still dark, the sky somewhere between black night and navy blue. A few scattered stars still hang in the heavens. It is cold, unusually so for June, and a fine mist seems to hang over my backyard. I search my pocket for my keys, pulling them out and opening the door to my parents’ car quietly. I slide inside, gently closing the door behind me.

I sit for a few moments, unsure of where to go. It’s the summer after my junior year of college. I am a History major, and I will not be graduating on-time. I had planned, originally, to spend this summer at a beach house with two of my friends from school. The plan fell through, as plans amongst college kids often do, and reluctantly, after a hiking trip to Ecuador that consisted of smoking various forms of dope and some half hearted soul searching, I find myself back here, living in my parent’s basement in the same town I have spent my whole life living in, and eventually, out growing. It feels, alone in the dark, in the inert car, as if I will be stuck here forever. I struggle to imagine my life outside of this town, these streets, these people. But I can’t imagine staying here either. There is, I have convinced myself, nothing keeping me here. My friends have left or are away for the summer. My girlfriends have found new, smarter, more mature boyfriends. I am alone here.

I turn the car on, the motor catching momentarily before roaring to life. I quickly push the car into reverse, the lights still off, and back out of my driveway in the dark. I pull away and peer over the dash, thankful that a light has not yet turned on in my parent’s room. Two houses down from mine, I finally turn on the headlights. I am, I have decided, going to drive until I can sleep again.

I start off driving down the hill that lies beneath my house. It curves gently, like the nape of a woman’s neck, and ends buried in a grove of towering oak trees. A trolley station rests at the entrance to my neighborhood, and in the pre-dawn darkness, it glows an eerie translucent yellow, as if the whole shabby structure is lighted. The bench in front of it is empty, as it almost always is.

Turning right, I find myself running parallel to the small business complex just outside of my neighborhood. One night many winter’s ago, I remember driving past it, the only car on the road, in a driving snow storm, ice and snow battering the American flag that always hangs at the exit and entrance to the complex. I’m not very patriotic, but for some reason it struck me as particularly beautiful and noble, this flag alone in the cold. I believe I was in my best friend’s car, now that I think about it, my head, weary from alcohol, resting against the cold, frostbitten glass of the backseat window. It is strange, sometimes, the things I remember, and perhaps more strange the things I forget.

At a stop light by a super market and a video store, I turn left. The road, having been open and filled with store fronts, quietly closes around me, trees and old stone fences encroaching on my car and me. Tonight, I welcome their company. I don’t know what it is, perhaps a lack of sleep or maybe just an incurable loneliness, but I feel as if they are embracing me.

The houses I pass are dark, save for the occasional front porch light glowing, a beacon for a teenage child returning late from a party or a diner. I was once one of them; we all were. At a certain point, and you never realize when it is, you grow out of coming home, and when you do make it back, there is rarely a light waiting for you.

Soon I make a left turn, shortly before a blinking yellow light. I navigate my way through a neighborhood, and come out the other side on the small campus of the college in town, the buildings stone faced and ancient looking. ThenI turn right, onto a street that quickly dives away from the road I was on, banking steeply down a hill and into a thick forest. Every time I drive down it, I feel as if I’m a kid in a fairy tale descending into the lair of some evil, unseen being. For some reason, I still find this thrilling. Past a stop sign and a few houses, I stop. There is a house, down a hill and hidden behind a cluster of bushes- as a boy I thought it was a fortress- and part of me wants to walk up to it. I do not. I watch Ashley’s house, as I have often watched her life, from afar. I haven’t seen her in nearly two years and I know that I may never see her again.

Her light is on, and I wonder why she’s awake. She hates mornings. Or at least she used to. I no longer know her. In a sense, I never did. But she always had this unseen power to sum everyone up in a single sentence, and it made me fall in love with her almost immediately. What had she told me back then, in her bed with the sun coming up outside? That I was such a romantic but so damn pessimistic about it all. Does that even make sense? It did at the time.

I drive away, thinking. I have decided there are certain people that, for one reason or another, you just love. You may not know them that well and you may not have much reason to love them, but you do anyways. Maybe I just fall in love too easily.

Above me, the sky is still a charcoal color, like Ashley’s eyes and hair, but there are no longer any stars out. I drive on, and further up the road is my old high school, a faded brick building that always felt more like a hospital than a school. Behind it is the football field, the lights darkened. I think anyone who has ever attended high school remembers football games, and remembers them fondly, but what I remember most about them is not the cold, or the hot chocolate, or the band, or even the cheerleader’s legs. What I remember most is the lights, and the way I could see them from a mile away, floating above the trees of my town, a fine mist always refracting their ethereal light and making it appear almost heavenly.

The sign in front of the school congratulates the class of 2007. I wonder if, soon, anyone will be able to distinguish them from the class of 2006, or 2005, or 2004... The ceremonies- prom, commemoration, graduation- are the same show every year, merely with a different cast. In towns like this, life just streams gently onward, eventually forgetting the past, all of us seeming to melt into one indistinguishable crowd. What I did in high school, someone else is doing now, and someone will do ten years from now. The world, cruelly, moves forward even if we cannot. Yet I hold a special fondness for those ceremonial days. It was a time when sentimentality, one of the more rueful human emotions, was not only allowed but held a certain bittersweet beauty. For one of the few times in my life, I was allowed to savor my good byes.

As I drive away from school, I pass the golf course I caddied at when I was eleven and the swim club where I life guarded through high school. Across a set of train tracks long since abandoned, there is a baseball field, overgrown and filled with weeds. I played little league there as a kid. When I was eight I struck out looking to end the championship game. The bases had been loaded. I drive on, and I pass all the churches in town, the Methodist a neat little red brick pyramid with a white bell tower, the Baptist an intimate white building with two spires welcoming you, and lastly, the Lutheran church where I went as a child, stodgy and small, an ugly brown shingled place, almost like a ranch house. I’d hated going there, the music loud and out of tune, the sermon long and droning. And as I grew, I found myself devoid of feeling, devoid of faith. The whole experience became an empty one. When I was old enough to choose, I stopped going. Yet tonight, somehow, I find something moving me, ineffable and subtle. Perhaps it is even faith.

Almost by surprise, I come upon Sarah’s house. It is dark and sheltered by an old elm tree. Sarah is not home, I am sure. She has a boyfriend, I’ve heard, somewhere at the beach. An older man, a lawyer. I try to imagine her now, but I struggle to see her. She has, for me, embodied the places we spent together more than anything else. When I think of her I remember a series of trips instead of a living, breathing person with dreams and frailties. She wanted to be a doctor, she thought, and she hated her legs. She liked children’s movies and hated baseball. She smelled like a summer afternoon at the beach, faintly of seawater and suntan lotion, (and she seemed to glow luminously like the August sun beating down on white capped waves.) But when I think of her I remember that beach, the pizza parlor we always visited. I think of the mountains where we used to hike, or the waterfall where we used to have picnics. I think of the house where we first met, buried behind a wall of evergreen trees and slightly decrepit. I remember places.

She never knew me, I suppose, the way I never knew her; I never let her. Perhaps because of it, I wish she were with me now, in the passenger seat, so I could show her all this, my life and all its places. I wish I could show her while she sat next to me, her wide, beautiful hips angled slightly towards me, her head tilted onto the edge of her seat, looking at me with searching brown eyes. I want to tell her how much I loved her, that I loved her so much I could no longer make love to her. I wish I could tell her that, in her company, there was nothing to desire, no sexual hunger to be fed. There was no emptiness when she was around. But she’s not, and I will drive on alone.

I work my way further through town, turning off the main roads and onto the narrow, winding one lane alleyways that make up the neighborhoods back here.

I have a memory, it seems, for each passing house or street. I drive by my elementary school and the playground, a series of plastic slides and tunnels behind a white fence, where I had my first kiss. Another Wawa. The house where I attended my first keg party. A trail leading into the woods where my friends and I used to skip school and smoke pot. And my friend David‘s house. His parents, it seemed, went on vacation every year around Halloween. During the party he had my senior year, I remember dancing with a wonderfully salacious gypsy two years my junior. There are times when I close my eyes and I can still see her; a long flowing skirt gyrating with her hips, her head thrown back, caramel hair pulled up, beads of sweat glistening on the muscles of her neck and in the small alcove at the base of her throat and the top of her chest. As for David, I’ve heard he’s spending his summer studying at Cambridge.

The remnants of my life lie everywhere in this town.

I pass by a darkened street and at the last moment, I stop, reversing down it. There is a house at the very end of the street, and it is dark, the driveway empty. I sit outside it for sometime, trying to piece together a picture of the insides of his house in my head. My best friend used to live here. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here, not since Casey left abruptly and headed to California. Every weekend when I was younger, we slept in his basement, at first trading baseball cards, eventually moving on to drinking beer and kissing girls. Up until the day he left, we threw baseballs in his long, sloping backyard. We spent many nights in that backyard near the end of high school, smoking cigarettes until almost dawn and talking about our futures. He was always so confident about his, and I so unsure about mine. I miss him.

After Casey’s, I turn back onto the road from which I came. I drive straight for some time. On my right there passes a house lined by a limestone fence. When I was younger, riding the bus to school, I remember stone figures of children playing perched on top of that fence. I cannot remember when they were taken down, but they are no longer there. I pass the Wawa Casey and I used to eat lunch at when we skipped school. It is empty but for a lonely looking Stroehman bread truck parked idly outside. In front of me, the road bumps gently, and a train rumbles by beneath me.

I’m tired now, and almost ready to head home, but there are still places I want to see. I feel, for some reason, as if I’m seeing all this simultaneously for the first and the last time. While I find I have lived, to some degree, on nearly every street in this town, they have never felt this foreign before. My memory about how things look, where a tree should be, the way a house faces a road, often fails to match reality. I worry the same might be true for other things, too, that perhaps I have constructed loves that never were, or conversations that I only dreamt. It would be easy, in this time before dawn, a part of the day which exists for so few people, to mistake all I am seeing for an illusion. Still, I keep driving.

Beyond a drug store and a laundro-mat, and just around the corner from a police station, I find Caroline’s house. It’s stone faced with gaping windows in front and a basketball hoop at the end of the driveway. A light is on in the front window, a chandelier silhouetted inside. I wonder who could be awake, if maybe it’s Caroline sitting in the kitchen with the New York Times and a cup of coffee, her legs covered in pinks sweats and crossed at the ankles, her slight stomach overhanging the waistband. Her hair, the color of wet gravel, would be pulled back, a few strands drooping in front of her thick rimmed glasses. I wonder if Caroline is even home this summer, or if she’s in New York or Chicago or Boston, working on a political campaign or maybe in a law office.

I turn left and around a sharp, hidden bend, past a park with an old gazebo and a small wooden bridge that crosses a swollen creek. The morning is still too dark to see, but my memory tells me all this is still there. My memory fills in the picture, me on the bridge and Caroline in front of me, her arms on my sides, daylight fading behind the oak trees. Three years ago now. She seems so far away that I sometimes find it hard to believe she actually existed. It makes more sense that she lay next to me only in a dream, her pale, freckled skin no more or less familiar than a woman passed by on the street. Except it’s all still vaguely real. Mini-golf on our first date. Her next to me on my basement floor, feeling my sweltering forehead and kissing it, her legs and flowered skirt carelessly spread open the way only a girl in love could sit. The way she had a strange obsession with key lime pie. Those details are too specific for a dream, right?

I drive further and come to a stop light. I make a right at the light, and don’t recognize the houses I pass. I keep driving, waiting for a familiar street but one doesn’t arrive. It occurs to me that I am lost in my own hometown. There is nothing I can do but drive onward.

Eventually I find my way. I recognize a pizza place where I took girls on dates in high school. I cannot remember the names or faces of all the girls I have been there with. I cannot remember if I’ve taken Ashley, Caroline, or Sarah there. All those dates seem to blend together into a dimly lit dining room half empty and smelling of dough and smoke. For some reason, I imagine every single one of those dates to have been on a brisk October night, even though I know that‘s impossible. I feel a strong longing to be in there again, awkward and nervous, trying too hard to impress a girl I hardly know. In fact, I feel an incredible amount of compassion for everything around me, all the people asleep in their homes, all that streets that, were it not for the memories I hold, would bear no difference from any other streets in any other town in the world.

On the horizon, the sky is a soft purplish color, and street lights begin to flicker and then, without warning, die out completely. I realize how tired I still am. I start home, back past my schools, and the Wawa’s. Past the house where stone children used to play, and past the house of a girl I will forever be in love with. Sometimes the life that lays behind me fills me with a sadness that seems to overwhelm me and linger for days. But today, I feel a closeness to all of this, my home.

I pull into my neighborhood and find the trolley station still empty. The bottom of my neighborhood is still dark, sheltered by the canopy above, but as I climb the hill, the world around me starts to take shape. I can see my house now. I steer slowly into the driveway, cutting my lights. For a few moments I sit in my car, the engine humming quietly, my windows down. I can’t help but find it funny how nearly my whole life can be recalled in a single drive.