As it nears three o’clock in the morning, I lay on my back and stare at the ceiling. I was in the house that haunts me in the form of my younger self.

With each flash of lighting, a new memory comes to mind. With every crash of thunder, I am overwhelmed with emotion. With every rain drop ascending from the sky to land on the soggy ground, tears fall from my cheeks and dampen my pillow.

It felt silly, to allow these four white walls and floral curtains take me back to a time when I was a child discovering her art studio or creating a newspaper stand when almost twenty years went by. Now the room served as a make shift guest room, the toys and art work -even the children, were now gone.

It made me cling to the spot on the wall, where the dry wall is missing from me removing artwork. It made me think about the many hours I spent, putting drawings together with my cousins and taping them on the wall to display. It made me hold onto the one piece of Lego toy that didn’t get thrown away, while the chest of my childhood was long donated.

I longed for the basement days, where we would hide out sharing secrets, playing cards, getting into trouble, and passing out on the spare mattresses down stairs under an ungodly amount of blankets just to keep warm. The nights we camped out on the trampoline, just to gaze at the stars because even then, I knew they would lead me to the love of my life.

I thought about the late nights we spent, the television shows we binged, the inside jokes we had, and the growing up we did together.

Worse of all, it made me grieve for the younger version of myself that I no longer am. I grieved for the family I lost, despite them being alive. I grieved for my childhood hopes and dreams that were unfulfilled. I grieved for the lost time, as ten years had already passed.

The sound of rain drops steadily falling after the thunder passed, reminded me that these feelings are apart of growing up and some part of me has excepted that. But there will always be a part of me I’ll visit often on 14 mile.