Our little piece of heaven.
Utopias are always on short supply.
We trust our fiction to deliver what reality cannot provide, but even the worlds of fantasy treat paradise as something temporary, a placeholder whose only purpose in the story is to be taken away from us to highlight just how devastating the fall from grace truly is. It's a lesson born on fire and shaped with ice, the kind that leaves a permanent mark because how efficiently it is taught.
My version of Eden didn't have marble pillars or ivory towers, but it was still very much built to impress: just a couple of towering buildings that shone like beacons while flanking a street so familiar to us all as to render us able to navigate it even during the darkest of nights (or, as it was often the case, while under the influence of two products of the earth: a grain and a seed). My friends and I were always drawn to these places like moths to a flame, understanding that every cent we spent playing stupidly intense deathmatches on the local internet cafe or buying bootleg DVDs on the neighboring store would only signal to our parents that we were, in fact, not ready to tackle the responsibilities of the adult world we so desperately tried to belong in. But we didn't care, because going home to unfinished essays with hard deadlines and incredibly tedious explanations to be given to disappointed parents was just a small price to pay for utopia, as was the crossing the street and getting into our favorite pizza place, the one with the eternally busted ceiling fan that rattled like crazy during hot summer nights in which ordering inside made us grow tremendous amounts of sympathy for the dough as it cooked on an oven so big as to take up most of the wall.
It was also in this locale that we started many of those rituals that were supposed to be eternal and now shine for how truly temporary they were, like shards of glass catching sunlight from the base of what used to be their impressive frame.
You can smell this picture... And so can I.
We would head for the bottom right booth and hold "royal court" on it, selecting this one in particular because it was near the only window that allowed us to survey our domain from: the large avenue that separated the pizzeria from the aforementioned temples of piracy (because all the games on the internet cafe were also downloaded illegally) and gave us plenty of chances to chat the night away as we teased each other with developments that really didn't mean much, but were enough to keep the grapevine growing. And when someone's phone lit up in that guilty way that bathed their face on a monochrome light? Oh, then were out for blood, especially when they tried to deny it! There's nothing quite as awesome as seeing a teenager gaze upon the message from the one person they had hoped would write back, then quickly try to mask it. I'm fairly sure the giant oven we were sitting close to didn't even approach the amount of roasting we were capable of delivering during those endless summer nights of pure, undiluted fun.
But, as I said before, utopia is never meant to be eternal. Not on this realm.
Ours started dying the second the local internet cafe closed its doors after getting robbed one too many times (and also because it could no longer compete with the advent of affordable home internet, the true dagger to its whole business model's heart). This was a massive blow for us because the place had both meant community and a way of killing time before gym class, an hour to just have some proper fun running around virtual environments before being forced to run around real places under the seething sun.
We had had way too much fun visiting that place and going at it all throughout high school, our voices echoing in eternity while battle cries rang out to the tune of: "KNIVES ONLY!", "WHERE'S THAT DAMN SNIPER?!" (and) "OK! WHO'S THE COWARD WHO KEEPS HIDING ON A CORNER! FIND HIM! FIND HIM!", much to everyone else's annoyance.
It's hilarious to me how we could spend an entire hour camping out on the internet cafe, running around like headless chickens just to avoid going to class to... run around like headless chickens.
We were masters of "cs_assault" and "de_dust" and practiced twice a week like champions who wanted to take their skills to the Olympics but, alas, we were born much too early for eSports, so our "talents" were witnessed by a small crowd of regulars who just wanted to chat in peace or complete some assignments while being constantly interrupted by the sound of low quality gunfire and even lower quality teases and insults that exited our mouths with the kind of speed and precision that our in-game weapons could never match.
Losing this place was the first serious blow to our carefree days because it was irreplaceable.
Oh, sure, some other cafes still hung out on the side, biding their time while obsolescence lurked in the corner, but we weren't really fond of them -- the surviving ones were either located in areas so dangerous that made our parents explicitly ban us from visiting (because we would have to travel to them while wearing our uniforms to make it back to class in time, which was pretty much signalling to everyone within visual range that we were prime material for robbing) or were so out of the way that it just didn't make sense to visit when we only had an hour to kill. It was a pretty sad state of affairs that kept us from enjoying something that we had already begun to take for granted.
Going for DVDs and trinkets was still a thing, but very few people wanted to by the end of sophomore year. This was another area that was beginning to show its age faster than anyone else could have anticipated: we were suddenly able to just download whatever movie or TV show we wanted, so long as they were available somewhere on the net, the only true limits being our own patience and the amount of pull those crappy 1 MB "broadband" connections were able to deliver.
These were noisy, crammed, completely devoid of privacy... And so, so great.
Oh! The pizza was still very much a thing, but it was suddenly ordered rather than waited for -- we had places to be, and our schedules didn't allow us to wait in the booth like we had before, choosing instead to take that majestic golden disc to the nearest house and set it on a table without wasting a plate, devouring it while PlayStation controllers got greasy and sticky as we, somehow, managed to do the impossible: playing Winning Eleven while also eating large amounts of junk food and downing Coke (or beer, if adults weren't around) at the same time, resulting in nothing short of pandemonium as someone would inevitably mess up and drop a glass or bit into thin air as their attention was solely on the screen, leaving cheese strings on the carpet that the unfortunate homeowner would have to either clean or explain away later, all while we prepared to head into the night with just enough stomach content not to throw up on the nearest corner, a surefire way to get denied entry to the places we wanted to visit.
We had tried to keep this going for as long as we could, but time and change are the two forces one can never defeat.
Once it was obvious that things were heading in only one direction, that small dent that had formed following the closure of one of our hangouts resulted in a catastrophic failure as the group (which was mostly composed of people from all ages) started drifting apart, carried away by whatever currents were taking a hold of them: the seniors were swamped with finals and the necessity to take one last taste of freedom before being unceremoniously dumped into the next big chapters of their lives. And for the rest of us that was the reminder that playtime was over.
Our digital weapons were silenced, our endless football matches all ended in draws, and the PlayStations were quietly put away as time and opportunity both slipped through our fingers and calcified as an early form of nostalgia, the kind that isn't distant enough to sting, but that's still very much felt.
We called this one "Argument Factory 2007".
But as I keep returning to the pizza place to have my lunch (still claiming that very same booth) and gaze upon a street that no longer belongs to me, the image reflected back to me by the dirty glass isn't a sad one at all.
It is true that every single landmark where our banners once flew is gone, that the "royal court" never reconvened, and that we are all scattered like leaves on the wind, but the "mind’s eye" can still remember it all in beautiful detail, almost as if the steam rising from the single slice I had ordered while being lost in thought was mimicking the fumes from a cauldron whose only purpose was to show the very outline of what had once taken place in there.
Maybe utopia needs to be temporary to truly mean something.
