Then We Were Grown

Chapter TWO

NOW.

CHARLIE.

I watch the city below grow bigger as we get closer, excited chatter filling up the plane around me. But as I look out the window, I can't feel a thing. I thought I'd feel a sense of longing as we'd land, but it feels like another place I've yet to discover. I feel numb when the plane lands and we finally walk out of it—numb except for the soreness in my legs and the pain in my knee.

Following the people that were on the plane with me to baggage claim, I can't shake the eerie feeling that's settling in my bones. I thought I'd feel happy knowing I'd be an hour away from home, but turns out I don't. I thought I'd feel joy upon coming home, but I think I might have lost the definition of the word. How can a place I've tried to avoid feel like home after years?

I gather my luggage and set it down to ground, pulling the handle all the way up and slip out of the crowd of people impatiently waiting for their own luggage. However lost I thought I'd be, it's like my feet have a memory of their own and lead me out.

Taxis are parked in wait right out front, dozens of black cars and vans just waiting for clients to take on. I knock on the window of a black Audi, startling the driver. He drops his phone on his knees and jumps out of the car with a composed smile.

He opens up the trunk of his car and lifts my suitcase up, sets it inside, shuts the trunk close and opens the back door for me. I offer him a gentle smile, and slide onto the back seat. He gets into the car, the engine revving.

"Where to, miss?"

"42 Hillside street, Callan."

The young man taps in the address in his GPS, and I allow myself a moment to examine his face as he pulls onto the road and straight for the highway.

He looks young, maybe a year or two older than me, and dark freckles run along the bridge of his nose under a set of bright green eyes. Somehow I wonder, had he not been a taxi driver, would he have become a model? Maybe in another life.

I focus on the landscape outside, watching the city disappear in the distance, replaced by fields and plains, until those fields change into hills and forests lost on the horizon. The highway digs deep into the mountain, into a large and long tunnel—and when we're through, the car comes out in the clouds.

Thick and white, it looks like we're just driving through the Heavens. There is a drizzle and the clouds linger above the valley, rendering it impossible to see the village below the bridge. And when the fog and clouds lift, half an hour later, we drive into the sunlight and right underneath a bright blue sky.

Anticipation grows on me as I pick up the signs that we're near from the city I was born and raised in. And for the first time in years I allow myself to wonder if it has become as unrecognizable as I feel I am.

If I walked there alone, would it feel like home? If I sat there overlooking the city, would I feel it in my bones?

The mountains close in around on us the closer we get to home, and suddenly I feel like I'm suffocating. I see the places I used to roam around free: the town square, the main avenue, the shops we've spent so much of our time in with Lily. The city centre disappear behind trees and houses, and the car drives through neighborhoods I can't remember. Until I notice the tree in full blossom in the corner of the street, and the thick bushes of roses that sit on the lawn.

My parents's house sits there, unscathed by time, untouched by the elements. But here and there, I notice the passing of time—the way the shutters hang on for dear life around the windows, the cracks in the paint on the front porch.