The Last Time Everything Still Felt Real

なつのひに
わらいごえまだ
かぜにのる

natsu no hi ni / waraigoe mada / kaze ni noru
on a summer day / the sound of laughter / still rides the wind

We met by the old river, the one that cut through the city like a forgotten thought. The air smelled faintly of iron and wet stone. Someone was playing a guitar on the other side—badly—but the sound drifted soft enough to feel like memory instead of noise.

He was already there, sitting on the low wall with two cans of beer sweating between his hands. The sun was almost down, the kind of gold that lingers a little longer just to show off.

“Tell me,” he said, handing me a can, “if you could relive one year, which would it be?”

I didn’t have to think. “Anything before 2016.”

He laughed. “That specific, huh? What happened in 2016?”

“Nothing,” I said. “And everything.”

He tilted his head. “Go on.”

“It’s like that was the last year the world still felt alive. The last time things were… fun, you know? When people still met by accident. When you could call a friend and end up walking half the night just because you could.”

He cracked open his can, the hiss sharp and short. “Yeah. Back when we were still in the world. Not orbiting around it.”

“Exactly.” I took a sip. The beer was warm, but it didn’t matter. “I remember back then—you’d go out without checking your phone every five minutes. You’d talk to people and actually see them. Not through glass, not through filters. Just them. Their real faces, their pauses, their imperfections. That was connection.”

He smiled, looking at the river. “Now everything’s mediated. Nobody talks unless there’s a reason. Nobody listens unless it’s performative. The whole world’s a feed.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Back then, people still had time. They went out more. They touched things. They met strangers. Now everyone’s drifting. Together, but alone.”

He nodded. “It’s funny. They said all this technology would bring us closer.”

“It did,” I said. “Just not to each other.”

A small silence fell between us. The sound of the water filled it, like punctuation. Somewhere upstream, a group of teenagers shouted, their laughter bouncing off the bridge. For a moment, it felt like a sound from another era—when laughter came from people, not from clips on a screen.

“You know,” he said, “sometimes I scroll through photos from those years and I can’t tell what’s memory and what’s just data. They look the same now. All flattened, all tagged.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s strange. The more we document, the less we remember.”

He smiled faintly, as if that hurt a little. “Do you think it’s just nostalgia?”

I thought about it. The light was fading fast now, the city beginning to hum with neon. “No,” I said finally. “It’s not nostalgia. It’s recognition. We all know something real slipped away, and no one wants to admit it. That’s why we keep scrolling—to find the thing we lost inside the machine that took it.”

He exhaled slowly, a long ribbon of breath dissolving into the air. “It’s weird,” he said. “I remember how even boredom used to feel different. You could lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling and let your thoughts go wherever they wanted. Now, the second silence hits, people panic. They open their phones like it’s oxygen.”

“Back then,” I said, “boredom was where ideas came from. You’d think, wander, invent. Now, we’re never bored, but we’re also never really awake.”

A train passed on the bridge, its lights flickering across the water. For a second, everything shimmered—like two realities overlapping, the world before and the one after.

“Do you ever feel like people have split into camps?” he asked suddenly.

“Yeah,” I said. “Everyone’s defending something. Opinions, identities, digital borders. Nobody meets in the middle anymore. We used to disagree, talk, drink, make up. Now it’s all noise. All certainty.”

He nodded, eyes half-closed. “It’s like we’ve forgotten how to be unsure.”

The air grew cooler. I could smell the faint salt of the sea in the distance. The city was behind us now, glowing faintly, pulsing like a machine breathing in its sleep.

“I miss how things felt before,” I said quietly. “When time moved slower. When people looked at each other instead of through each other. When friendship didn’t have to survive through screens.”

He didn’t answer at first. Then he said, almost to himself, “I remember those nights. Walking through the old district after midnight. You’d hear music coming from open windows, smell bread baking somewhere. You didn’t need to share it with anyone. It was enough just to be there.”

I nodded. “That’s what I mean. The world was textured. It had scent and weight. Now it’s flattened, digitized. Like we’ve all been reduced to reflections.”

We sat in silence for a while, the way old friends do when words stop being useful. The last of the sunlight disappeared. Streetlights blinked on, one by one, like tiny awakenings.

Finally, he stood up. “You know,” he said, brushing dust from his jeans, “we’re sitting here talking about how people don’t meet in person anymore.”

I smiled. “Yeah.”

“And yet,” he said, “here we are.”

The water moved softly. The sound of the guitar drifted again, closer now, still slightly out of tune. I watched the reflection of the city shimmer and break on the surface.

“Maybe,” I said, “this is how it begins again. One small conversation at a time.”

He smiled, and for a moment, the air between us felt like those years before—
before the screens, before the noise,
when everything still felt real.