Keeping Up With the Wind: A 'Burban Tale by Suleyma Moon

17

Laughter and music floated into my moonlit room as I sat up and looked around. For a minute, I actually considered forgetting about Whisper's party and going back to sleep. Fools trippin' anyway, I thought to myself as I lay back down and closed my eyes. It was at that moment that I had my very first epiphany.

I suddenly realized that I really would have to make it through my life on my own. Friends would come, and although they may seem like they'd be around forever, friends would go. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is. In life, when it really comes down to it, we all have to make our own way.

            Finally, after several minutes of wrestling with myself, I decided to get up. Instead of crawling out of my window and going next door, though, a glowing blue light and the sound of canned laughter drew me into the living room of my pitch-black house.

            I saw the television first. It was some show about the perfect family, with perfect kids who had perfect boyfriends and girlfriends. The kids were living it up in the "best days of their lives" and could always manage to solve all of their problems by the time the corny music began to play, and their thirty-minute segment was up. I wondered if there really was a place where all of these perfect things could exist. I mean, they had to have gotten the idea from somewhere.

            Looking through the window, I saw Li'l Jay's house. It looked almost like the sitcom house. The only difference was the horrible things that waited inside. The bruises that came out of nowhere and landed on Li'l Jay every time he did something wrong, and sometimes even when he did nothing at all, was an occurrence that would have never happened to these "perfect" children on television.

            Blaze and Faith's family was actually the closest that I had ever seen to a real life TV family. Unfortunately, with perfect parents, you don't always get perfect kids. I don't think that their parents had ever done anything more than spank them, which led me to believe that Blaze must have inherited his hair-trigger temper from someone further down the line.

            Come to think of it, Ace and Spider had somewhat of a perfect family, too. That is, after Ace's real father moved out and his stepfather moved in. When his parents first got divorced, Ace was forced by the courts to go live with his dad. In a little over a year, though, his mother and stepfather had won their custody battle and were able to bring him home. They all packed up and moved to Michigan shortly after that. Of course, being Mexican-Indian, they ironically didn't exactly look "all-American", so that excluded them from the ideal television family of those days, too.

            Blaze and Faith's family was definitely physically closer to the one on TV. With more of their Irish blood than Native American blood showing through, the kids looked like the American dream, but piss one of them off and you'd see just how far from it they really were. I think that their mother used to be a scrapper too, in her younger days, but she had completely mellowed out by the time her kids were born. Faith was more laid back like their father had always been, but she had a little fight in her, too.

            Before I knew it, the television show was over and the commercials began. Commercials featuring people that children want to be like when they grow up. I had been leaning against the doorframe, watching the show, but now straightened and looked around. My father was asleep on the couch. Or maybe he had passed out. I couldn't tell which.

Before my mother died, he had never had a drink a day in his life...that I knew of. Now, it seemed like all he did was drink.

I guess people handle tragedy in different ways. He and I were alike in the fact that we'd both just rather pretend like our troubles didn't even exist.