One, two, three. I counted the seconds between the flash and the sound. Three miles away, or so they say. Three miles away, and I was stepping out of the bus into the pouring rain. The lightning and thunder rumbling above echoed in my mind as I crossed the street, propelled by an instinctual fear. I ran for a nearby parking garage to stay safe, hair, t-shirt and black mini skirt soaked within minutes. Each raindrop was a small blade, pricking my bare legs and prickling them with goosebumps. 

Visiting my hometown, I had a deep desire to reconnect with my childhood best friend. Her house was merely 1000 feet away, and I felt my heart catch in my throat as I stood beneath the cover of the parking garage. The previous day I’d stood on her doorstep, searching my bag for a pencil to leave a note and realizing I didn’t have one. I was too scared to knock, but I didn’t exactly know why. It wasn’t like there was anything negative between us; it had just been so long that I wasn’t even entirely sure she was real, wasn’t sure that the house I looked at was the right one, even though the address matched. Wooden letters overgrown with moss still spelled out “2003B.” We were inseparable in childhood– neighbors, she was a year younger than me and always looked up to me, always wore the clothes I grew out of. 

The recollection of these memories fought with my stress, urging me to run through the lightning to her doorstep. I noticed a woman walking up to the door from down the street– her mother?– and decided to make a run for it. My hair was drenched and my clothes were dripping as I made it to the doorstep. The lawn looked exactly the same, the trees taller and the condo complex just a little more weathered than it was ten years ago. 

“Are you okay? Do you need to come in for a second?” the woman asked me. 

“I actually came to see you,” I responded awkwardly, “At least I think you’re the right person– Darija? My name is Evelyn, do you remember me?”

Darija’s eyes softened and brightened at once, with recognition and nostalgia. “Is it really you?”

A girl stepped out of the house holding a towel, asking who I was. Saule. She looked so much older than last time I’d seen her; she was stunningly beautiful, with mousy brown hair to her shoulders, olive skin and piercing aquamarine eyes. When I told her my name, tears began to form in her eyes. She held out her arms to me as her mother handed me a towel. I sank into them instantly, the scent of her house filling my nose– the scent of earth and home-cooked food, of friendship and life. My mind was drawn back to ten years ago, to the first time I stepped into her house and to all the times after that. The first time I met Saule, her and her mother Darija were walking past my house. My one-hundred-year-old house, the house I grew up in, the house I miss with my entire heart. While walking by my house, she petted my cat on the street and our families quickly started talking. It wasn’t long before we spent nearly every day together; we were young enough that we had nothing else to do. Her family was Lithuanian and I affectionately remembered eating goose eggs at her house for the first time, blowing up lamb’s lungs in her sink on Easter day. The only arguments we ever had were over who would wear which Disney princess dress or who would dress up as which character from The Sound of Music. I still had picture magnets of me and her on my fridge at home. The way she held me when we were little came back to me, so similarly to what I felt in the moment, but in a time when we had both experienced so much less. 

Saule led me up the stairs and into her room, a room that had changed so much since the last time I’d seen it. I realized that I couldn’t exactly recall what it had looked like last time; the thought somewhat disturbed me. She handed me a pair of black sweatpants and a gray hoodie and told me to change in the bathroom upstairs. Once changed, I stood in the bathroom, leaning over the sink and observing my still-dripping reflection in the mirror. I could hardly believe I was standing in this same house. As I squeezed the water out of my hair with one of the turquoise towels hanging on the rack, I inhaled again the scent that so specifically characterized this house to me: the grounding earthiness, the hand-dyed wool, and the old, yellowed pages of books. I felt my body in her clothes, let the scent consume me, let my five senses take a moment to process all the memories being triggered in my brain. It was an odd sensation of overwhelming nostalgia and a sort of confusion– something I’d only experienced the day before, when I went to visit another one of my neighbors. 

“Girls!” Darija called from downstairs, “Come down here, I want to talk to Evelyn!”

We looked at each other and laughed, then ran down the stairs. I could already smell food from the kitchen. This was home.