It Gets Better

The Duck Park

When I was younger I used to go with my grandfather to feed the Mallard ducks at the local riverside park. I remember how excited I was when he would load me and my younger sister into his rusty, old, Toyota mini-truck and make the decent trek to the other side of town, stopping at the McDonald's for pancakes beforehand, per tradition. 

The park was beautiful, green grass covered the soft hills. Water lapped at the rounded out rocks around the riverbank and melded together with the songbirds to create an all too familiar song that even the most stoic would find inviting. I loved that park, it often felt like a second home for me, seeing as my first was never really permanent. 

I still wonder about the park sometimes. I don't think I'll ever visit there again as an adult, though the thoughts linger as I stare at my computer screen, my eyes weary of the artificial light.

I long for rest, but I'll settle for this fitful sleep. 

I know it's my fault, though. I lie awake at night, staring into the nothing above my bed. My love drifting to sleep beside me and my dog at my feet. I shouldn't feel this sadness inside my chest, but I do. It bubbles over the lid of my head and soaks my skin. It floods this dreary New York apartment.

I drip sadness.

Even now my hands shake.

I guess to explain my hurt I'll have to start somewhere else much farther away from this place.

A place I'd like to call the storage building.

Growing up my parents had this storage building on the outskirts of my step fathers home town where we would keep things I suppose they didn't want anymore but couldn't bare to part with. Knick-knacks and old gifts, family photos and whatever else they didn't really care for. Boxes filled the cold concrete room and random forgotten memories littered the floor. The stench of mothballs was strong, even from my mother's car where I refused to leave. I never understood what the purpose behind the storage building or if my father ever went back for all of those things. Part of me wants to think it all may still be there, collecting dust. Though, it's been so long, I doubt that could be true.

I think of that storage building in my dreams sometimes, as a beacon of all the things I may have left behind and can't even remember.

I close my eyes and I stand outside of it, looking up at the metal paneling, my feet anchored to the ground by vines as they have overgrown around my body. Much like they have everything else here. The rusty shell of my grandfathers truck and my first car, over turned and littered with moss. The earth growing around them, consuming them. I stare down at myself from atop of the building, watching myself as the ivy intertwines with my being. This is where I imagine all the forgotten things going. I open my eyes and I am still here, staring blankly into nothing.

Sometimes I wish I'd been left there too, but only sometimes.

The last I saw of the old storage building was when we stopped by to drop of the final few boxes of forgotten things before we said goodbye forever to the duck park and the old storage building and moved far away from that small town.

Probably for the best, though I'll never really know.