I want to be somewhere I’m not.

Somewhere warm and balmy, palmy even, in the tree sense, that is…

I want the summer wind to wreak havoc on my hair as I drive down a water-lined highway, tousling and tangling and generally bastardizing any ‘do I could have come up with, branding me with the true feeling of late sunsets and wistful glasses and sunglass tans and salt water.

I want to be wearing my Reef flip-flops, with the rainbow tags, all distressed-leathery after being worn in by long days and laxidaisical attitudes.

I want to see magnolia trees and azalea bushes, riverboats and canoes and windsurfers, braving the cold without wetsuits, a badge of honor.

I want to be 14 again, scared and excited and nervous and anxious and hopeful, strategically planning our ‘route’ as we cruised in the humid evening air, looking for the objects of our affections.

I want to be riding in a car with my teenage crush, drinking a McDonald’s Orange Drink, the sugary sweet kind that they would serve after Little League games instead of the fake-replacement Hi-C drink that they pass off as an unequal facsimile these days.

I want to listen to a tape player in a beat-up old car, blasting “Boston” or “Foreigner”, rock bands that still knew how to rock that we discovered in the grunge era of the early 90’s and felt so retro-cool to be listening to while we flirted and flounced and illegally drank our way to our future.

We wanted to be somewhere else then – we wanted to be out of high school, out of college, in the real world.

We couldn’t wait for our lives to begin, couldn’t wait for the ‘next big thing.’ We wanted to cut class and kiss behind the church and smoke behind the Taco Bell and drink in front of the Subway, dodging cops as we attempted to comandeer our pithy little social lives into something more meaningful.

We wanted to breathe it all in, inhale the future, embrace the lives that we so wanted to be living.

And now we’re here, and we want to go back.

Or at least I do.

(But I’d settle for a McDonald’s Orange Drink.)