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“What is?” Steve asks after a long pause. He is sitting on the chair next to me, which has taken far more abuse than the couch.

“I think I was happier when I was depressed.”

“Huh?”

“I know that sounds nuts, but if I think of the good times I had back when I was in that whole teenage angst stage, and then think about how I feel now that I’ve, grown up a bit shall we say, I think I’d pick the teenage angst deal over this.”

“But, Sara, you wanted to kill yourself every other day.”

“I know, but that was because everything that happened was the end of the world back then. Now, I have real problems and I know that suicide is no solution to anything. What a paradox! I don’t really mean I want to be depressed, though. I just miss all the fun we had, in here especially. Do you remember the first night we claimed the garage for us kids?”

“Yeah,” he says with a smile. He is starting to get that far-off look in his eyes, the same one I feel. “That was so cool. Dad had just finished building it, and they’d thrown the old couches and chairs back here, and then they put in the electricity. Was it you who thought of bringing a CD player?”

“I think so. And Sean, Jerry and Brad were with us.” Sean and Jerry both lived across the street and were still juniors in high school. Brad was the boy in the green house. We hadn’t seen him in awhile.

~~~

The second installment of an old short story.

Next installment: The Trouble with Twins

~EJ

“It’s weird,” I say. I look around me. I’m sitting on an old couch, long worn out and starting to tear, that my parents got before I was born. Across the back part of the large driveway that has seen countless games of rollerblade hockey and an abundance of chalk drawings, sits my bluish gray house. There are angles and lines everywhere, a window now and then. I used to think it looked unfriendly, kind of aloof, but then was when I had an imagination and houses had personalities.

Inside the garage, the one my dad and his friend built that one summer that I thought I discovered who I was, are so many scattered things a cyclone may as well have hit. My sister’s rollerblades and a pile of bike helmets in one corner, a table covered with pieces of different puzzles in another. The telescope that broke the first time I used it is against the back wall, in a jungle of bikes and scooters. The windows have collected dust, so much so that it’s hard to see through them to the green house with that cute boy my friend May was always chasing after. The walls are unpainted and a bit uneven. The two small lights on the ceiling, which is also unfinished, still work, and that is a good thing.

~~~

This is the first section of a story I wrote during my first semester away at college. It’s sort of autobiographical fiction and was probably the first thing I wrote that wasn’t sci-fi or other-worldly in some way.

Next Installment: Only Happy When it Rains

~EJ