Quarry Summer
The heat never lets up. You’re at the quarry with whoever showed up, iPod on repeat, taking photos on a camera that was already obsolete the day you bought the phone. Early 2000s and that passed for a summer. Proof you were somewhere doing something, which was enough.
Your music taste was garbage. U2, Akon, whatever leaked into heavy rotation. You’d argue about playlists like you’d actually discovered something instead of stealing it from a file-sharing site. None of you had taste—you just had opinions about taste, which is different.
The quarry was perfect for this: stripping down, jumping in, lying on hot concrete while hours passed. The kind of nothing that only works when you’re young enough to believe time is infinite. Just music loud enough to fill the silence, people you’d known forever in the casual way of bodies that share a small place, the weight of boredom that felt like freedom because there was nowhere else you had to be.
It’s all one afternoon now, compressed into a memory of sweat and chlorine and that specific smallness. You can’t get back to it, but every summer you think about it anyway.