(no subject)
I'm fighting the grip of exhaustion as I try to delve into my deepest reaches of thought and feeling to chip a piece of the precious element that makes up the core of my heart. With a keyboard as my hammer and my words as my spike I will force this tidbit from feeling, to though, and finally into its physical representation in some fantastic depiction of an emotion that simple explanation cannot inspire.
It’s an eerie feeling, creeping through the brush along a winding path of vegetation, far more overgrown than my memory had presented for the picture in my mind. However, no amount of green and gold foliage could mask the worn pathways through this narrow stretch of forest between Hobart Pond and the Whitman Masonry. I had meandered down these paths on a daily basis in my youth. This is where I was comfortable, where I was home. The sights and smells were as if they came from another world, another lifetime, another kind of reality- the way the light filtered through the mess of branches and falling leaves, casting an iridescent glow across our faces. “Ah, to be a kid again”- this will be the last time I can really say so and laugh afterwards; for in another two weeks I’ll be a different creature by all emotional, physical, and not to mention legal, standards.
I look at you, and immediately I’m amazed at how these two worlds have seemed to collide, but in the most graceful way, without clashing or overpowering one with the other. Everything I have is what it takes to keep from simply bursting out in laughter, like a flash in the dark, as the smell of your hair mixed with the smell, or memory, of the sewage spilling over the dam into the quiet creek. Today, you kissed me here, and seven years ago I sat with a friend at my side, fishing pole in hand, and maybe my third or fourth bicycle thrown lazily across the dirt path with no real concern for its welfare. In this tree we’re holding each other now, laughing and enjoying the scenery and the beautiful weather, when six years prior I would spend my days and nights here resting, escaping a world that I couldn’t relate to, into a world I could create myself. The funny guy, who was really tall, he smiles and laughs now as we reminisce of a time when I was a completely different person. Like the butterfly denies ever being the worm- I say that I was a product of my environment back then, when really I was just looking to learn, and looking to understand, looking for the good in the things I couldn’t understand alone. Back when my friend traded in his Mohawk and tattoos for video games and late night movies with the rest of the gang.
It’s taken a lot of time and effort for me to grow beyond the person I left that town as, and even more to accept it. In all truth, this town, those people, that street, and all the things that I lost or gave up because of how much that little backwoods town lacked, would have been the inevitable end of me. With each passing year I saw my life and the lives of those closest to me collapse under the immense pressure of everyone else’s previous failures, and with enough time, enough attempts, opportunities, the ceilings caved and the lives of those I held dearest were awash with a kind of misery that I find unbearable to conceive, let alone endure. It’s my firm belief that with each time he depressed the syringe he forced in all of the darkness and anger and sadness he feared, and in turn forced out his soul, in small increments, day by day, until all of him was gone. Now I could break down and cry when I look upon his face and see the kid I loved when I was young, and how he’d grown to everything I’d hate today.
It’s a relief to me that some of the smaller things still survive. The path by the pond, the tree with all-to-conveniently arranged blankets that may or may not have been the greatest place I had ever slept. Nick’s family, his silly red hair and awkward yet hilarious and all-too-familiar presence has withstood the winds of change and sands of change for almost half a century now, and it’s my greatest hope that this consistency will endure for another five years until we’re both out of that little void of a town so that we may kick back somewhere far away, and just do what we do best-
Laugh, and go to sleep.