When I was a little girl, we owned three German Shepherds. I thought of the four of us as a little wolf pack. We would go on adventures and quests together. I even had a little set of bow and arrows I would shoot all over my yard and watch them soar through the trees for no particular reason other than the fact it made me feel like a character in a fantasy book.
Then my dad went bankrupt, and he was forced to sell everything. In a matter of weeks, my wolf pack, my perfect little blue house, and my childhood were all things of the past. I don't even have a picture to savor it all.
I live with my mother now. I always tell myself I need to start reliving the Glory Days of pretend games and fairy hunts. Somehow, it always ends up at the bottom of my priorities. Too many mommy-daughter fights and broken hearts have severed the way of that childish and innocent mindset.
Nowadays, my alarm clock wakes me up unpleasantly, instead of birds singing for me at the window, although I do still feel like Cinderella often, but not in the good way. The tangled sheets enveloping me are no longer tentacles from a cute octopus that cuddles with me routinely. Now they are just simply nuisance pieces of fabric that hinder my ability to get out of bed quickly. The sky isn't sad. Rain is just a form of precipitation in the water cycle. Trees don't talk anymore. They aren't your friends to name, to play with, to climb up their branches and drift into sleep in the safety of their limbs.
Trees are now just things to cut down, because they get in the way of the construction of a new, bustling metropolis.
A handful of times, I've been able to go back to that blue house in the small town of Cut 'n' Shoot. It's a nice drive, about forty five minutes if you take your time. I know the way by heart from all of the times I've trekked back and forth. The hypnosis of the steady whistling that comes from driving down a highway still gets me every time. It sounds like a train making itself known until finally reaching its destination.
We never stay for very long. I don't think I have ever even gotten out of the car once. Just a drive past it, a U-turn and one last drive by before heading home is good enough for me. Those few seconds of gazing at that house evokes thousands of memories.
Those are the window shutters we painted, a little faded of color now, but still nice. Those are the azaleas that only bloom a few times a year that my dad took such pride in. There's the wrap-around porch where we would sit together and discuss the functions of the universe as if it were regular table conversation. It wasn't until much later that I realized most dads weren't like that. Nevertheless, the nostalgic smell of cigarette smoke always fills my nostrils at this point. Right there is where the Wolf Pack and I would play and frolic. And look at that. There, on that rooftop, is where I climbed out of my window seat in the middle of the night to sit on the roof shingles and have a conversation with the full moon, and when the gusts of wind came swirling through the trees that were still my friends at the time, everything was alive that night. And I swore on my father's life and the existence of fairies that I felt a god.