Before August

Amy Anderson captures the quiet moments where we wonder when we left our inner child behind in Before August.

We race to grow up and then wish we never grew (Image: Adobe Stock)

During that summer when I was nine years old, I would ride my second-hand pink bike around the neighbourhood. The other kids in the street would join me. We knew nothing of the world, and the world knew nothing of us yet. 

It was always Abbey’s front yard where we’d leave our bikes all over the lawn, bleeding onto the footpath. Our shoes were kicked off our feet in an attempt to cool down, making a bright array of pinks and blues around us.

We’d eat ice out of plastic rainbow cups. The ice would become a pool at the bottom of the cups as the sun beamed down, and our small warm hands cradled them. Our skin was burning, and our legs were eager to get back onto the bikes. But we sat, and we giggled, and by the time we got back on the bikes, the cups were empty and left on the lawn until Abbey’s mum left her air-conditioned home and picked them up. 

This all came crashing down on me, sitting with my new friend, an adult friend. She puffs clouds of nicotine into the cold air, and I come to realise it is already August and I am twenty-one years old. I haven’t been nine for a long time, and yet it shocks me to sit in front of this woman who has only ever known me as an adult.

Abbey eventually moved away two years later. Her once-cool home, a hub for us kids to meet at, would soon be inhabited by a new family none of us kids could be bothered to meet. We were too old at that point; we’d all moved on to high school. Then it was Emily, and then Ally and Michael. 

Eventually, there were no more Christmas street parties. No more days spent on Abbey’s trampoline. No more bikes stacked outside.

My friend has finished her cigarette now and wants to go back inside the bar, no longer able to warm herself in the winter air. I nod and follow her. 

Maybe I’ll never stop grieving that little girl on her pink bike, but part of me will always be barefoot on Abbey’s lawn, melted ice slipping through my fingertips, skin burning under the sun, the whole world waiting to begin.