In Ethertown , the sky hangs low,
a weight of salt and jet fuel.
The planes, silver veins in a fading blue,
cut paths to everywhere
but here.
The streets whisper secrets to those who listen,
their cobblestones slick with stories
of fishermen and freight workers,
of loud mothers yelling down the alleys,
their voices cracked with love and exhaustion.
We ran like ghosts through the ruins of yesterday,
past corner stores where candy jars gleamed like treasure
and old men played dominoes
under a yellowing light.
Everything felt infinite then,
even the broken things.
The harbor was a mirror for dreams,
its ripples swallowing the neon of forgotten nights.
We built castles in the tide's shadow,
knowing they would wash away
before dawn touched the docks.
In winter, Ethertown was a song—
melancholy and deep,
the kind you’d hum to yourself
when the wind tore at your coat
and the stars refused to show.
We lived for summer, though,
for the ferry’s horn and its promise of escape,
for the cracked pavement warm beneath bare feet,
for the laughter that skipped
across rooftops like a heartbeat,
uneven but alive.
Now, Ethertown floats in the back of my mind,
a haze of smoke and sunlight.
I try to grasp its edges,
but it slips away,
a dream of a place
that was never quite mine,
yet holds me still.
In Ethertown , every corner bent time,
the past and present tangled in electric wires
strung tight above the streets.
We walked beneath them, heads tilted upward,
wondering if we could balance
on that thin line between staying and leaving.
The air smelled of brine and burnt toast,
of diesel drifting from the docks,
where men’s backs curved like waves,
unloading dreams they’d never chase.
Their hands told stories their mouths never could,
calloused whispers against splintered wood.
There was the park by the overpass,
its grass struggling to grow in the shadow of exhaust.
Kids spun wild on the rusted merry-go-round,
laughing like the world could never touch them.
We watched the planes rise,
their engines drowning our promises:
“One day, we’ll go.”
The old woman on the corner—
she swore she saw angels in the alleyway,
their wings lit by the flicker of a busted streetlamp.
We’d laugh, but part of us believed her,
because how else could this place
feel so heavy and so light?
Ethertown was all contrasts—
the roar of the highway
and the silence of empty tenements,
the comfort of a home-cooked meal
and the cold steel of fire escapes at dusk.
We held onto it all,
even when it burned our palms.
And at night, the skyline blinked,
a thousand tired eyes watching over us.
The harbor hummed its lullaby,
pulling us toward sleep,
toward dreams of places
where the streets weren’t cracked,
where the planes didn’t always leave us behind.
But even in my dreams,
Ethertown calls me back.
Its alleys stretch like veins,
its heartbeat steady beneath the concrete.
It is every story I’ve ever told,
every song hummed under my breath.
A place I’ll never leave,
though I’ve tried.
In Ethertown , 2003 buzzed like a skipping CD,
static and rhythm,
a year caught between dial-up and something faster.
We were teenagers, heads full of static,
finding signals in the hum of a broken world.
Mix tapes spun in our Walkmans,
each track a coded message,
a manifesto scratched in silver discs—
punk riffs, breakbeats,
the low growl of guitars like an engine starting.
We dubbed songs off late-night radio,
fingers twitching over the pause button,
afraid to miss a note.
The playlists were everything we couldn’t say aloud.
Smoking weed was a scavenger hunt—
phone calls whispered like conspiracies,
a handoff on the edge of the basketball court,
paranoia rising with the haze.
We giggled until our ribs ached,
the world bending in strange colors,
as we scrawled the meaning of life
on the back of an old science worksheet.
Magic mushrooms were harder to find,
a friend’s cousin’s hookup,
a trip through three neighborhoods,
half-truths and half-baked plans.
But when we ate them,
the city became an alien landscape,
the cracks in the pavement pulsating with secrets.
The planes above turned into spaceships,
their trails laced with cosmic intent.
We educated ourselves in stolen hours,
not from textbooks, but from old sci-fi paperbacks—
Asimov, Bradbury, Le Guin,
their covers worn thin by too many hands.
We stole them from the downtown bookstores,
sprinting past the disapproving gaze
of the owner who knew,
but never stopped us.
In those pages, we found worlds
where the future broke open,
where the rules bent,
and the underdogs won.
We read them by streetlight,
by the glow of a dying flashlight,
letting the words seep into our minds
like smoke through a cracked window.
Even TV became a kind of teacher.
We watched with narrowed eyes,
reading between the lines of laugh tracks,
pulling apart the polished lies.
The late-night reruns spoke truths
that the daytime couldn’t touch,
hidden in absurd plots and throwaway lines.
We didn’t just watch;
we dissected.
Every night ended the same—
sitting on rooftops, passing a joint,
watching the city breathe below us.
The lights of the planes blinked out
one by one,
and we whispered our plans to leave,
to be something more
than kids with mix tapes and paperback dreams.
But the truth was, we loved it here—
the grime, the struggle, the cracked windows
letting in too much cold air.
Ethertown was ours,
a place built on stolen books,
scratched CDs, and critical eyes.
It was a city you couldn’t escape,
not because it trapped you,
but because it became you.
We lived in the spaces between the noise,
where everything felt possible and nothing real.
The year hung heavy, like the vinyl records
we’d find at the thrift shop for a dollar—
scratched, broken, but still spinning
with truth we couldn’t name.
The world was still mostly analog,
and that made the moments count more—
before the internet swallowed us whole.
We’d ride the bus to nowhere,
heads filled with music that pulled us apart,
pulled us together.
The mix tapes became maps,
each one a route to something we couldn’t describe—
a feeling, a dream,
a promise that maybe we didn’t have to leave
to escape.
We smoked our way through nights,
lungs burning, minds free-falling.
There was something about the weight of the smoke,
the way it wrapped around us,
that made everything seem both unreal and urgent.
The parks were our laboratories,
testing the edges of perception.
We’d giggle at nothing,
staring at the stars like we could touch them,
the trees bending into impossible shapes,
and everything felt like a secret we were meant to uncover.
The mushrooms, too—
a journey in themselves.
It wasn’t just about getting high;
it was about seeing past the bullshit
and stepping into something bigger.
The world around us flickered like a broken film reel,
but for a moment,
everything made sense—
the universe a tangled string we could pull apart.
We'd sit in someone’s basement,
lights low,
half of us in the clouds,
the other half still grounded,
debating what was real
and what was the dream we were trying to wake up from.
Then there were the old paperbacks.
Sci-fi novels with yellowed pages,
dog-eared from too many reads.
The plots were simple then—
survival, rebellion, invention—
but we weren’t just reading them.
We were studying them,
learning how to bend reality,
how to shape our own futures.
They were blueprints for the chaos we were about to create,
showing us that maybe there was a way out,
but only if we made the map ourselves.
We talked about everything,
the world at our fingertips,
but still, our phones were dumb—
texting was a game of patience.
No endless scrolling,
no pictures uploaded every second.
But we were already smarter than the screen.
We saw the world in full color,
not through filters,
but through our own eyes,
and we weren’t afraid to question it,
even if it meant we had to fight our way to the truth.
TV was our other classroom,
not the pretty shows,
but the ones that aired when the world wasn’t watching—
the late-night specials,
the documentaries hidden between infomercials.
We watched eelevatd—
the contradictions of America,
the quiet rot behind the fame,
the subtle betrayals in everything we thought we knew.
This was the reality
that TV didn’t want us to see.
But no matter how many books we read,
how many times we watched that same VHS,
no matter how many songs we crammed into our ears,
Ethertown didn’t change.
It was still there,
spinning on its axis,
stubborn and strange,
waiting for us to leave,
and waiting for us to stay.
We were still kids,
still trying to figure out
how to escape a place
that felt like home.
And maybe we didn’t need to.
Maybe the dream was just this—
the mix tapes, the weedsmoke,
the quiet lessons in paperbacks and TV reruns—
a rebellion that only made sense
when we lived it,
together.
Ethertown may have been the cage,
but it was the only cage
we knew how to live in.
-Lou Toad, 2024
