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Chapter 5: Growing up
There’s a time when you’re a little kid and you just, live. You adventure, dance around the woods that you call your back yard. I remember going out into the woods nearly everyday after school, on the weekends, and just pretending to be something I wasn’t. A warrior on a quest for jewels and magic relics. A knight searching for dragons, beautiful princesses to cavort over and make my own. Me and my pals Ian and Josue even made our own little gang. We built a serious little fort deep in the heart of my own woods, outfitted it with carpet, walls and a ceiling…
I later turned on this group for some reason. When you’re a little kid, crazy s**t happens you can’t really explain as an adult, when you look back at it all. You’re stuck in a little world crafted by the mind, an imagination zone where anything is possible, and the impossible occurs, even madness that can only really be analyzed at a later time in life. Now that I look back at it all, I was a crazy little kid. I mean, we planned on paintballing the mayor for christsakes! We had some serious issues, with anger, with hate, and we wanted everyone to know about it. I was easily manipulated by Ian, the oldest of us all, into doing pretty much anything. Including beating up kids he, leader of the group, didn’t like.
I remember one day we were wandering about the woods when Ian snatched us to the side, me and Josue, and said, “Some kids are building a fort down the path. Go destroy it, any means necessary.”
Me and Josue put on ski masks, grabbed up baseball bats, and proceeded to smash the fort right in front of the kids. When one of them came up to stop us, I literally grabbed him by the throat and shoved him down the side hill, a ten foot drop that left him pretty messed up. His friends ran off, not even helping the poor kid scrape himself out of the muck that he had burrowed into, and threatened to tell his mother about us beating him up.
I told him I’d break his legs right then and there if he spoke another word of the incident, and I never heard word of anything since then.
Yeah, crazy kids.
But even so, we never did drugs, never got into the things I did later in life because we were just too damn active, we kept busy. My mind led me to do things I never thought I’d ever be able to do, and I even learned to face a lot of fears when I was younger because of Ian. He was like a mentor for me and Josue. He taught us how to fight, literally having us fight him and each other, learning how to hold a fist, sling a kick. He taught us to walk quietly, to creep unnoticed. He taught us how to fall from very far places, and not break a leg. (I’m talking far. Multiple times even.)
He taught part of me, essentially, the ways of being a man. I reckon that’s what it’s like to have an older brother, someone who beats you up, pats you on the back, slap’s you upside the head when you’ve done something wrong. It was comforting, even, to know I had been taught so well, or so I thought. I wonder now where that guy is, because I haven’t seen him ever since I moved from my neighborhood to here, Youngsville, NC, all those years ago..
That’s how it goes, how people fade into memories, like ghosts do I assume, the people who don’t wish to leave the earth, digging their talons into something. They stay awhile in your brain, floating about, telling you things that did happen, should’ve gone a different way. It’s sad to think I’ll never see him again, but they’re many people that I haven’t seen since grade school, since middle and beyond. I wish everyone could stay in my life who’s been there, stick around so that when I’m on my deathbed, I can look on at there faces, touch them and know they are family, they we’re life. Even my enemies, my rivals in combat and wrestling, the people I’ve fought in streets and beaten up for dark pleasure. I’d want them to come to my funeral, to cry over my suited form…
or spit on me, curse my name for ever living. It doesn’t truly matter to me. I just want them to see it, to know I am dead and to remember me, know that this life has ended and that it’s finally all over.
But what is over? Life ends for one, but where does that go?
Only time will tell, for the end is a journey of the self.