06 - "We'll go there some day"

We had our summer house for as long as I could remember, and we still do but no one goes there anymore. I sometimes wonder what it looks like now, and I drift away thinking of the long days we spent there. We would drive out at the beginning of summer when it was already burning hot in Los Angeles and we stayed there for weeks or even months. We shut it down in the autumn when the first leaves started falling off the trees and sometimes it would even snow.

There were always people there - Belle and her father, Stephanie, Chloe, Carl and his family. We spent late nights in the garden under the dozens of lights hanging from the trees around us, just talking or listening to the deafening silence and our heartbeats. My father told me about his childhood, how he would climb up on the roof of his family's house and watch the stars for hours, as a way of escaping the constant restlessness.

I never felt alone with him. He said the skies were filled with the same stars he had seen then, but watching them together made us both feel as if anything was possible, as if we could fly away and never come back, just like we secretly wanted.