It was strange to be back in Somerset, as if revisiting a friend from long ago. Like the Autumn leaves that skipped across the cracked sidewalk, illuminated in a golden haze from the afternoon sunlight, everything here was immersed in colors of the past.

The weather outside was beautiful. The late summer breeze whistled a soothing lullaby as it strolled across the streets. Sunshine peeked through ivory-powdered clouds, beaming in a soft glow. It was so lovely, in fact, that for the first time in weeks, children bounced out of their homes onto the playground, the air dense with laughter and an overwhelming nostalgia.

Jason watched children on swings soar into the air, hoping to sway so high their toddler toes would touch the pastel-blue sky. He turned around to see his own piece of heaven – his daughter, Lily, whose ocean blue eyes mirrored the hue of the infinite horizon. As dusk painted the sky a dozen watercolors of peach and wisteria/reminiscence, Jason felt that for the first time in years, he had found his place to belong. Even when he left, years ago, he knew that all roads led back to home.

**

As Jason opened the door to the attic, he felt as though he were stepping back into the past. The perfume of homesickness, intermixed with sunlight that poured through the ceiling and gleamed against layers of dust, lingered in the air. He heaved unpacked boxes across the oak wood beams, the house groaning under his footfalls. A leather volume, dusted with age, rested in an alcove at the corner of the attic. Jason picked it up. He brushed away its thick soot and opened the cover. Inside the pages were vintage polaroids, abandoned relics of lost time. The passage of childhood came back to him in waves, a tsunami of memories flooding the cages of his soul.

Jason’s hands ran through the grayed photographs, blending into the faded fingerprints of his youth. For a nanosecond of the universe, he was seven again, fingers tracing the edges of his mother’s smile, the arc of his father’s arm around his shoulder. His mind craved these bits of forgotten magic, these slivers of light that lived only in polaroids and his memory.

He turned to the first page. His eyes rested on two boys with matching smiles amidst a summertide grass. Jason wanted to reach through the polaroid, painted a wistful palette of gray, and taste the infinite verdure and sunshine on his lips. He remembered that day with the clarity of the fallen light of morning.

Two houses, one city. The same mist of sunlight greeting their shadows at dawn, halo of starlight illuminating their breaths at dusk. Three streets apart and a minute’s walk away, it seemed as though fate had bound them together, or perhaps it was the twisted nature of chance.

Jason recalled the day in the photograph, what seemed like centuries of summers ago. “You’re fat,” he giggled, as if it were the dirtiest word in the world. Alex rolled his eyes and jabbed him in the ribs with his chubby knuckles that had touched more Legos and Star Wars figurines than human skin.

“Shut up, dude. Let’s play water fight... unless you’re a scaredy-cat!” Alex’s words fluttered in the air like the monarch butterfly that landed on Jason’s wrist. They had met the first day of pre-school. Alex’s building blocks tumbled onto Jason’s tower. He apologized with his mouth but laughed with his amber eyes. For a brief moment, their hands touched as they clambered for blocks, and they giggled as if it was the obscenest act ever. It was felicity. Their mud-brown orbs a reminder that they were seedlings of life in their greenest stage.

Jade leaves glinted shimmers of golden-ivory dust. Against the verdant foliage of Alex’s backyard was a corona of sunshine, enveloped by the lullaby of laughter and gap-toothed grins. The fruits of vitality ripened on birchwood branches, swaying to the rhythm of the breeze and harmony of songbirds. Jason and Alex stumbled barefoot in the grass, dirt staining their baby toes and water-soaked shorts. They chased after each other a thousand miles an hour, disappearing into the endless roadways, running into the melting horizon. That afternoon, they were taller than the majestic height of a tree, the ocean-hued depths of the sky. Sunshine gleamed outside them, inside them.

Jason thumbed through the photo album, his mind submerged in the dusky sea of remembrance. Lost time flooded the rivers of his soul until he was drowning in an ocean of nostalgia. His daughter, Lily, sung his name in a sweet lullaby as her footfalls creaked against the steps to the attic. She buried her face in the curve of his neck, so he planted his lips to the honeyed surface of his little girl’s forehead. He could breathe again.                                         

Sundown fell onto the tree-lined street and between the attic beams, gilding the dust clouds in a haze of slumber. Jason’s forefinger touched the edge of the last polaroid in the album. He could hear the radiance of midsummer fireflies at the crack of twilight, taste the sounds of night swell on his tongue.

“Hey, Jason?” They sat together on the steps of Alex’s front porch, rusted paint peeling off the maplewood planks and onto their thighs.

“What?” Silence drifted through the aura of nightfall. Flakes of moonlight glistened against shadows of the receding dusk.

“It’s going to be the two of us forever, isn’t it?” Jason’s eyelids flickered against the dead of night. Like the curse of mid-adolescence, the stars seemed everlasting, a glittering multitude of desires and daydreams, the heartbeat of midnight.

“Of course.” Alex’s lips matched the crescent of the moon, curved upwards into a smile. Their interlaced silhouettes blazed through the darkness, glowing in the starlight.

**

Jason wasn’t a religious person, but gazing into the sunset cityscape, as God’s watercolors painted the canvas of sky a million shades of eternity, a rebirth of faith surged through his bloodstream. With his own little heaven nestled in the crook of his arm, the dying sun and man-made skyscrapers of distant cities pointing towards the cosmic clouds, he felt as though the universe was finally aligned in his direction. He felt a whole man again.

With the gentle bursts of wind that drifted ashore the grass and tickled their ears with sound, Jason and Lily stared in silence at the immortal atmosphere above them. Somerset’s eve bruised the sky with celestial embers of dusk, twirling in their astral majesty. Trails of stardust set ablaze the skyline, street lamps waning to their smolder. Moments like this were rare. The mystique of night. The splendor of solitude. For a nanosecond of time, in the gloom of paradise, only Jason and his little girl existed on this vast and terrifying planet.

Lily snuggled deep into her father’s chest, his heartbeat in syncopation with their crystallized breaths. For the first time in over a decade, Jason was finally seeing the stars in all their timeless glory.

This was his native homeland. His blood and roots, sunken in its soil. Jason pulled Lily close, and together they watched time and space descend before them.

“It’s going to be the two of us forever… You know that, right?”

“Okay, dada.” Lily’s eyes twinkled like ebony flames against the stars.

**

Jason remembered the night when the roadways of his life diverged into opposite directions. He was in bed, amidst a frigid winter evening. He had wakened from a lucid dream, trapped in the paralytic world of half-awake. His breaths grew ragged, hands shivering despite the warmth of his blankets. A puddle of sweat pooled between the valleys of his mattress.

Faint breaths melted through the walls, the sound of choked exhales haunting the air. Jason tiptoed out of his room and into the bathroom, where a quivering figure’s hand lifted toward its mouth to stifle a sob, silent tears running alongside ridges of skin.

“Mom?” Jason stood in the doorway, amber eyes glassy with confusion.

“Honey?” Jason’s mother kneeled in front of the bathtub, as if hiding something. Jason’s eyes flitted to a pile of dark auburn hair collecting at the bottom of the shower drain. His mother sat on the cool porcelain tiles, as if the weight of the world had buckled onto her trembling knees.

“Where’s dad?” His mother’s eyes, the tinge of the ochre woodlands they used to trek in late November, averted his gaze. Later, when Jason’s restlessness drove him asleep, the sounds of sorrow were drowned out by the din of a faucet that seemed to flow for hours. A pile of crumpled tissues lay next to the sink.

In the early hours of the morning, Jason learned that his father had spent the night at the local hospital, diagnosed with lupus and alopecia. He would be transported to a facility in Oregon, hundreds of miles away from home.

There was a pond nestled in the backwoods behind their house. Tiger lilies of early spring unfurled their tangerine petals into flowers, their blossoms nosing the water’s surface for air. The willow grove nearby beckoned with silence, whispering a hollow nocturne as daylight flirted upon its branches. Emerald leaflets wandered into the pond, floating in foreign land. Jason closed his eyes and saw his father’s circular orbs, the heavenly blue of oceans, mirrored in the pond. His father, searching for air with the tiger lilies, as if he couldn’t breathe. His father’s dark auburn hair subsiding with the last summer leaflets, his father’s voice echoing the same nocturne as the willow trees, a whisper of what he once was.

Jason knew before he knew. The day of the move, his arms melted into Alex’s neck in a stiff embrace. They swallowed their feelings, accumulated over years of childhood friendship, into the backs of their throats. Their mud-earth eyes smiled at each other one last time.

Later on the road, as the blood-orange sun leaked into the horizon, the air swollen with the words left unsaid and the things they’d never be, Jason glanced outside at the rolling jade hills and evergreen trees and felt detached from it all. Maybe it was the knowledge that from then on, Somerset was no longer his. He was nothing more than a visitor passing by. The melodious notes of songbirds floated in the breeze. Familiar street signs, houses, and cars drove by, and the tender earth turned golden-brown in the sunset. It didn’t feel enough like goodbye.

**

Daybreak swallowed the sable midnight into its white light. The maple leaves of autumn coated the gentle earth in the garments of early September, and Jason and Lily sat at the kitchen table while pedestrians, mothers in minivans, and teenagers on bicycles hustled about to the crisp tune of a new season.

Jason’s hand gripped his daughter’s, afraid of letting go. “Have a great day at kindergarten, sweetheart.” He bent down and kissed the top of her forehead. Outside, the aubade of sparrows merged with dawn’s sunlight to produce a new kind of music.

“I’ll miss you, dada,” Lily pouted. Through the window, Jason saw the way sunshine parted onto the evergreen trees and the grass where he and Lily frolicked barefoot, where he and Alex played tag seas of summers ago.

“You’ll only be gone a few hours,” Jason chuckled softly. He paused, and whispered so Lily couldn’t hear, “These were my happiest years once.” Lily’s eyes, the heavenly blue of oceans, twinkled like small stars. Illuminating the entire world with their warmth. He wiped away a dribble of milk from her chin. “But these years with you are my favorite now.”

Lily clutched onto her father’s grasp, and together they strolled into the beauty of the unknown. The sun dawned along the edge of the morning horizon, and willow leaves danced in the wind to the tune of life’s serendipity. Jason grinned as they walked hand in hand along familiar roads, the scent of home ripe and sweet in the rippling sunrise. Lily’s sneakers crunched against the rustling fall leaves as she skipped a few beats ahead of Jason, their dark auburn hair glowing in the rise of a new day.