Nobody leaves this town alive. We are engraved into the concrete blocks outside of the schools' main entrance. Our words "...Did you hear what happened to..." still echo in the background with the trees when our bodies escape. They pick apart our memories "...Do you remember when she said that outside of..." and leave them in with the dead flower beds. They dissect what we're doing "...I heard they eloped after graduation. They live..." after we leave and move on to better things. Our bodies may leave, but the ones who stay behind never allow the thought of us to rest. We are constantly brought back into the forefront of peoples' minds-what we did wrong; our good times; things that seemed important but never really were. Nobody can rest in peace in this town. We can never leave. We all must somehow stay behind...
He is an accumulation of all he’s ever known. His hair is grown from the pictures on billboards and adapted to fit the people he studies. His clothes are cemented to his body; influenced by the icons in magazines, the people he’s sure he’ll become. His fingertips are caked with dirt from the greenhouse he makes his money in. His eyes are encased in the lenses that his community says “look cooler.†His political opinions are the production of people who tell him what is right to believe. He is not his “own person†as they promise he is. He is an experiment, a collage-of all of them.
She lives in a land of fiction and fun. She awakes to the sound of fireflies buzzing and the feel of the early-morning sun kissing her cheek. She runs a brush through tangled hair made of spaghetti-with no sauce, though, of course. She packs her papers for school, edible paper and ink only, into a bag made of kissing butterflies. She grabs her portable symphony and plugs the miniature trumpets into her ears. She puts shoes made of tiny blue men on her feet. She hops on to her t-rex, named snuggles, of course, and rides to school, where she rests behind her lemonade stand, watching rainbow-flavored droplets of rain cascade from the ceiling. They soak her in feelings of uncompromised joy. She exists to them as a normal girl. Take a peek through her lashes, however, and you see the world as she sees it; a world of the imagination.
He flies through the air as though nothing can touch him. One arm grasping a brown teddy-bear, his fur matted from years of cuddles and kisses, his other hand clutching his magic wand, which he plans to use to beat the bad guys up, as he‘s seen in his cartoons. Wrapped in “big-boy†Spiderman ‘undies and a pristine sheet off of his bed. He soars over the barber-shop, where his daddy goes to get his hair cut and his beard shaved. One day, when he’s taller and he has a lady he calls “darling†and a child he calls “son,†he will sit tall and proud in the same chair his daddy sits in. He’ll discuss the things that the other grown-ups talk about, and will sit patiently while the barber puts the fluffy white stuff on his face. Shaving cream, he’s heard his daddy call it. He won’t be afraid of the long sharp razor that the barber uses. He’ll be courageous, just like daddy. He soars on, past the big-kid school and the park where Santa visits once a year, down to the supermarket where mommy buys dinner. He rides carelessly on the wind, invisible to all; someone that no one can grasp.
He gives her the jitters. He smiles at her, and it’s like she’s the only girl from Earth to Planet X. He asks how her day was, and it’s like she’s the only item on his agenda. He tells her that phrase, the “L-Word†phrase, and she can imagine the entire world disappearing; evaporating into tiny particles of insufficient, useless, and unimportant matter. There is nothing that can amount to the effect he has on her. Nothing is comparable to the way he treats her: His poetry, his laugh, how he thinks that she’s his most important subject. She counts her stars and reflects on how insanely lucky she is to have this man in her life. Oh, how he makes her fall in love.
Countless stories. The actions of generations of souls-too many to fully comprehend. Births, deaths, love, and abuse. All freely roaming around in this tiny little town. Seasons and years, decades, centuries. A thousand experiences for each and every person; whether living here or simply passing through. And they never fade away. The footprints of hikers in the park remember the dog that walked along side, the oak tree still bears a pair of sweethearts’ initials wrapped up in a heart. Though the memories of everything we’ve done may grow dim, they never completely wash away. How could they? They are our past, the past in this town. Our stories; our lives.
* First-prize winner of the S.H.S. 2008-2009 creative writing competition.
