Nighttime dreams

8 o’clock. The sun is screaming to let it in. The summertime has come. School has already ended. Of course my parents are wide awake while I am still in dreamland. But as always I forgot what I dreamed of quickly after the 8 year old me choose to wake up. I take a few steps to the window while my vision is still a bit blurred. The sky is blue. The sun is out. July has arrived. It is time to be yourself again.

After cleaning and making myself a bit more presentable I walk in the living room. I take my usual cereals and the milk out. Now we are getting to the million dollar question. Do I put the cereals first or the milk? I am a milk first human being. Standing against the majority. Milk first and then the cereal. The sane choice. But let us move on because the most important thing is to enjoy your cereals. After that I look on my old Blackberry. It is almost 10 o’clock by now. That reminds of my parents phones. Old Nokia bricks. Legendary. The Blackberry was my first phone. My dad bought that to me in used condition and I instantly fell in love with it. I still don’t know the full name of the phone. Sadly I did not have the numbers of my friends in Neighborhood on it. Walking outside, ringing at their flat and asking if they want to come to play.

But since we were on a summer break everybody slept longer and it was way to early to even get out and play. So I did what every boy used to do probably. I played video games. More exacly Nintendo 64 or the old Playstation. While most people had the brandnew Playstation 3, Xbox 360 or the Wii, I still played N64 and it was glorious. I remember playing games like the famous James Bond Golden Eye or Mario Kart 64 of course but also more unknown games that I absolutely adored. One game featured Disney characters from Mickey Mouse and the concept was the same like in Mario Kart. I used to love that game. Another game was a competition about snowboarding. Especially in wintertime this exact game was magical to play while it snowed outside. Then I also played a lot of NBA or NHL on the Nintendo. I could have played forever and not even knowing what the right buttons to smash or how to change the default language. That was certainly a big reason why I learned English earlier than most people. I was just to stupid to be able change the language in video games. So I played a bit of video games before lunch was done. Usually we ate pasta in the summer. In many different concepts but all were pretty simple to cook. Sometimes I would help my mum in cooking too. We used to sit together in the living room and enjoyed a fresh plate of pasta.

Afterwards I often went in my room and read a book. I knew how important it was my way to get away from video games, my parents but also my friends from my neighborhood. Often times when they asked me to play outside I told them no because I was reading a book. They would look at me pretty weird since reading books was really unpopular but I loved it. When I was younger my mother read a lot of books and it instantly peaked my interest. Through her I got to reading pretty early. So I would be reading some short story books. I remember the books from Raymond Carver. I still read his books every year and I find new and exciting stuff what stories that I read ten times probably by now. Hours upon hours I would get lost in books when all of a sudden bell rang in our apartment. Of course it were the kids from the neighborhood.

I dressed myself and went down. Sometimes we were only two, three people and sometimes we were ten people but we always had fun. We would ask everyone if they had time and they want to play with us. We played hide and seek, football and so much more under any weather and any heat. It did not matter to us because we had the most fun of our lives. We felt absolutely at peace. We had everything and we played until evening arrived and child by child went at home again. Sometimes we would feel really badass when we were outside until 10 pm and still play football. No thoughts about everything else than having fun and being carefree. Then I would go home and go to sleep again. The day after I repeated that, everyday we would repeat that and we had the biggest joy in our lives. We made summer meaningful. I would repeat that everyday until we went to Italy. But when I came back I was so happy to be able to it all over again. Not a care in the world. Just me and the other kids against the whole world. We were one beautiful big club.

Do I miss it? Oh hell yeah. Every now and then I think about the joy we had, the things we did and how chill and carefree everything was. It was the perfect storm. We did it for a couple years and after that of course you grow older, some kids left the neighborhood we had other interests and we all grew apart. But it is about the memories we made. The time we shared with each other. No responsibilities in the world. Only us kids with each other. The time will never come back, but the memories will always remain and that is the most important thing.