Thoughts About the Past

Sometimes I wonder how it would have been like if I stayed and went to middle school and high school with you guys. Perhaps my circle of friends would have turned out much different. Perhaps I would have been different  I wonder how everyone looks like now. I want to see how much life has changed you all.
   Ashley, Patrick, Lacey, Jenny, Matthew... 
I don't even remember the rest. I'm slowly forgetting your names. I've already forgotten your voices and your faces. Yet to me, you're all still those eight year-olds. You are the way I last saw you when I left, all I ever knew. 

But you know, I did go back. Not that any of you were there or any of you would have known. I visited Clarendon two years ago when I returned to Portland shortly for vacation. Which would have been a decade since I had left. They closed down the school. The windows and doors all boarded up. The old playground was still there though, now rusted and un-maintained. Those mountainous hills right behind the school are too, exactly as they were but now I know better that they're really just small mounds. Do you guys remember that baseball field? The ones we played kickball on all day long after school. It's still there too but now it's empty, broken and cold. 

I had started school with all of you. I wish I had continued to grow up with all of you too. It's something I would never know be like yet I still yearn for. Sadly yearning for something that's past and irreversible, something that was out of my control as a child too.