Chapter Text
When I was a kid, my parents would take me monthly to visit the city next to ours for a day.
I’d sit in the backseat of my dad’s old convertible, and we’d drive down the highway and past the forested mountains that surrounded our town.
My favourite part of those visits was the drive back home at night. I would look out my window the whole time, focusing hard on the gaps between the tall trees, hoping to see a monster peeking back at me.
I would usually end up falling asleep with my face pressed against the glass, woken eventually by my father when we were home.
He'd watch me as I'd curse myself for falling asleep, and would chuckle when I'd vow to stay awake long enough to see the monsters next time.
Then when I was twelve years old, we moved down south to the deserts, and my parents swapped out the convertible for a brand new Chevrolet.
There were no more forests to squint at under the sun’s dying light. The roads from our new town were lined by only sand and cacti, without a single mountain on the horizon. I spent the rest of my childhood and teenage years there, and I barely enjoyed a second of it.
Even though we still made monthly visits to the new city near our desert home, the journeys back no longer brought the same joy they once did. If there’d been anything better to do, I wouldn’t have bothered looking out the windows.
When I turned 20, I decided to move away, I couldn't live in that depressing desert town any longer.
My father was a car nut, and he surprised me with a mustang for my birthday. Despite the hideous shade of orange he chose, I was overjoyed, and this was the car I made my journey in.
I left my parents to their comfortable desert life, and headed back to the mountainous town I grew up in.
It took me just less than a week to get back home, and I arrived at the still familiar city late one Thursday night.
A wave of nostalgia passed over me as soon as I entered that tree-lined highway, and I thought back to the many nights I spent searching for monsters for the first time in many years.
Gazing out through the branches, I realised that this had been a moment I'd been waiting for ever since we left, and that I could finally be truly happy again.
And it was on that last day of driving, when I was the happiest I'd felt in years, that was the day I saw my first monster.