...ing - -2003-

But the voice wasn't the singer's anymore. It was mine.

That was the thing about being seventeen in 2003. We were the last year who remembered a before. Before the war in the news every night became just another commercial break. Before the internet learned to bite. We still had flip phones with antennas, and the only thing we feared was a busy signal. But that summer, something else was bleeding in. ...ing -2003-

That fall, school started. We went back to our desks, our lockers, our lives. And no one mentioned the summer. Not the static. Not the glass air. Not the drowning. But the voice wasn't the singer's anymore

But sometimes, late at night, I still feel it. The flicker. The skip. The world holding its breath in 2003, waiting to become the world we actually got. We were the last year who remembered a before

I remember the exact moment the drowning began. Not in water—in sound. My sister had left a CD on repeat in her boombox: a burned mix with "Hey Ya!" scratched over a Dashboard Confessional acoustic track. I was lying on the shag carpet, staring at a water stain on the ceiling that looked exactly like South America. And then the chorus skipped. Not a broken skip—a choosing skip. The same three words, over and over, for what felt like hours: “I’m not okay. I’m not okay. I’m not okay.”

“You okay?” Jenny asked. She was treading water two feet away, perfectly fine. The Frisbee arced overhead. Normal. The year 2003, normal.

Everything was still. Too still. The other kids were kicking, splashing, laughing in slow-motion bubbles. But I saw them the way you see figures in a snow globe after the shake—frozen in the middle of a gesture. My best friend, Jenny, her mouth open mid-shout. Mark, his arm raised to throw a Frisbee that hung in the murk like a pale moon.