It’s humid. Our skin sticks to each other's arms and the yellow curtains are failing to dwindle the intensity of the sun. It must’ve been around 3 pm, hour 4 in the back of this bus, destined for a remote and almost vacant childhood town, when we finally took 10 minutes to stretch our legs. It was the end of August, yet it seemed that even in the brightest of sunlight there was a never-ending swarm of mosquitoes ready to attack. I had forgotten my bug spray and knew the twins were too capricious to get any themselves.

This summer had treated me to an array of troubles. It seemed that unbeknownst to me, there was a lease placed on my friendships, which I was entrapped by, that simultaneously expired as soon as school ended and boredom began. Maybe it was boredom that elicited bitterness in our thoughts of each other. Maybe it was meant to be. In any case, I found myself in heaps of desperation and disillusionment that soothed when the twins invited me to their childhood home.

We stepped off at the very last stop and waited for the twins to greet us. Our bags were heavy, the sun - scorching, and it seemed as if nothing could satiate the dripping dread I was feeling. With the summer I’d had, seeing anyone felt like gambling with my social life. We had to be near each other for 3 days straight with no chance of escape, because of the ridiculous bus schedule. I felt as if I would lose my mind. Nonetheless, ages away from home, I couldn’t back out anymore.

When the twins arrived, they walked us back to their childhood home. It looked as if a family of ghosts were living there. The dust had piled up on the shelves, there was no running water, only a well, and the wooden floors laughed with vacancy as soon as someone stepped on them. And yet it was full of love. The house, paired with the office that was built within a barn decades ago, spilled with warmth. Like milk infused with honey that mothers make when their children are ridden with a cold or that feeling of fathers tucking their little ones into the best sleep of their lives.

One of the twins once told me that even though their parents were divorced, their father could never love anyone as much as he loved their mother, and that was visually palpable in this house. On the outside of the office he painted 3 faces, two of the twins and one of their mother, on the kitchen wall he had written with stunning, cursive, red writing “You are beautiful.” It seemed that nothing left this place untouched with adoration. Even so, the house has been vacant for over a decade. Empty. Empty and looming with an uncertainty of its further use.

For the next three days, we did everything as planned. We painted, we wrote, we read, we drank and talked, we lived. We left every corner of the house with footprints of life. The grass, the water, the sky, everything outside of this town, outside of this home was like a magazine to us, ideal and entirely untrue. The only reality, the only place of refuge and retreat was here, in the middle of nowhere. I began to feel as if I had lived here my entire life, as if my parents had used the now desolate kitchen, as if they used to peek outside of the living room window to see if I hadn’t disappeared from the yard. This house served as a reminder of childhood that every kid had experienced, even if for a short moment, basking in the safety of a promised tomorrow in a promised land on Earth. And feeling the state of forsakenness this house had been in only made us closer since we all could now understand the despair of an abandoned home.

For three days, I was infused with worship for a home I never called mine. I had never known a place that had the ability to resonate so deeply with my own childhood until now. And it seemed as if this house could do that to anyone, as we all shared similar sentiments. We never fought or even got close, if anything we only deepened our trust in each other. And almost as if the world had listened to my thoughts, I hadn’t gotten a single mosquito bite.