“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