It takes approximately twenty steps to cross the Arch from Lovers Lane. At the fifth, the screaming begins: a collective, deafening exhale of years of held breath.
By the tenth step, the dizziness kicks in. The momentum of my peers carries me forward. Everything is going by too fast—the high I’ve been chasing for years is suddenly right before me.
Beneath the chanting and the roar of the crowd is a friction that goes unnoticed.
It’s in the hands I keep tightly by my side while others throw theirs in the air. It’s in the way I desperately burn the weather-worn stone into memory, as though I never wanted to leave this place.
The grip I have on my blouse tightens, stuck in the limbo of wanting to rip it off and wanting to keep it on for just one more hour.
Some parts of the crowd will always demand the cameras. But for the rest, the victory is quiet, almost like a theft slipped into pockets and carried out through the gaps of the celebration.
When we take our final steps, no one will look back. There will be no fanfare behind. There will be no one left to wave us goodbye.
Steps eleven through nineteen become a blur of all the noise and the lights. A sudden shift in the air passes as the trees give way to the open sky, and the roar muffles into the dull hum of España Boulevard.
By the twentieth step, the pavement clears and the noise recedes.
Behind us, the Arch of the Centuries closes like a heavy stone door. It is no longer a portal to who we might become, just a monument of who we used to be. F
