The Tree House Next Door- Writing and Editing

Chapter 1 (Rewritten 22/10/16)

Your childhood shapes your entire future; the choices you make, the relationship you have with your parents, the friends you keep. All these little decisions in life add up, and although we don't realise it, every decision slightly alters the course of history. Marginal it may be, but each choice can send you flying, swerving off into a different direction altogether. But usually those are pretty big decisions we're talking about; breaking off a relationship with someone, telling a lie straight to someone's face, turning off a life support machine. Choices like that can destroy a person.

I should know.

•♥•

Everything starts at the beginning. Your early years have the most impact upon the course of your life; it's the stage at which you become the person you will be for the rest of your life. My childhood wasn't particularly joyful.  Only in hindsight do I realise that the prolonged absence of my parents had a lasting effect upon me, causing underlying problems I would dismiss until much later in my life. Back then, to my younger, much more innocent and naive self, the mostly missing parents who occasionally dropped by to see me. Truth be told, it didn't really matter to me that I didn't see much of my parents, I didn't question where they were or what they were doing, in fact it was better than when they were around. I was an independent child by the time I came to understand the concept of loneliness, and once I started to feel the effects of my isolation, I was able to do something about it. I grew up in the outskirts of town; not much to do, not many people my age. Until one autumn day when a new family moved in next door, who just happened to have a child my own age.

I probably would have preferred a girl, so she could have been my best friend, but I wasn't complaining. Any company was better than no company. It seemed only natural that we would spend our days together; neither of us had siblings, and there was little for us to do. So, at the tender age of 5, we fell into a steady friendship.

Our place of solace was a wooden cottage nestled in between the thick branches of the oak tree, comforting and inviting. We would sit in the tree house at the end of his garden for hours, inventing fantasies of far-off worlds, where blooms of colours swirling our skin faded away into nothingness, leaving only thoughts of light. At first, he was a quiet boy; rarely speaking, preferring to listen to me talk and narrate stories. Slowly we coaxed each other out of our respective shells; my willingness to share my thoughts and imaginations of what the world could be like and his contentment with listening to others and absorbing as much as he could. 

In the beginning, we were two separate and completely different people, then, like paint, we grew closer and over time the two starkly contrasting personalities mixed. We became entwined in each other's lives so perfectly that in retrospect I couldn't understand how I had lived for so long without him.

We were Orpheus and Eurydice.

It was years that we spent in each other's company, completely oblivious to the world outside of our own little bubble. It was perfect that way; even at that age we were aware of the cruel being of life, the monster it was behind its fickle facade. We were two pillars, holding each other up against the crushing weight of the cruel world, and we would have escaped from the vicious claws, had it not been that my pillar was taken away. His family moved away, and everything we had built over the years came toppling down, the burden we had upheld together was now a leaden weight that I had to hold on my own. And all that was left were ruins where he had once been, a ghostly whisper of what we were and what we could have been. Over time my memories of him slowly drifted further out of reach, leaving me grasping desperately to recall the years we spent together. But it was to no avail, like smoke they slipped through my hands, receding from my short term memory into a deeper and darker place that kept them concealed until later years. Gone were my thoughts of our shared childhood, each day I thought of him less and less, until all that was left was a murmur of someone that I used to know, and a name forever etched into my soul.