pencil shavings

fourteen: sam

Anger is an odd emotion to deal with properly. I know slamming doors has some true therapeutic side effects, but so far my rage has only ever reached a sock-hurling level and never so far as door-hurling. Mom always jokes that she could make the windows quake when she was a teenager, but I try to tone it down, to not let that anger in me boil over.

That's why, after Mom was ignoring me in favor of Seinfeld, and Bryan was getting crumbs all over my beanbag in the living room, I told them I was going to bed early and slipped quietly out the front door. No door-slamming. Just walking.

The wind is welcoming as I close our front gate, playing with my hair like a close friend. And there is no Jerry Seinfeld on full volume, no aimless workplace gossip, no cookie pieces in the seams of my beanbag. I walk under the dimming house lights, kicking at a little pebble in the path, thinking about how different pebbles are from each other, how unique, and yet how we only have one word to group them all. How this one - this one pebble is the one that I'm kicking with this much leftover anger on this day in summer, but in words, everyone else sees it as just-your-everyday-pebble. And that makes me think about how words don't do the world justice, and how even if I were to write all the details down about my pebble or about my walk down our street past Mocha's, even if I wrote a Bible according to Sam regarding this walk, no one else would ever know that same walk. To a reader, a witness, the trip can only physically be as much as any other jumble of words on a page. Try as we might, this travel will never be real to anyone but the traveler.

The branches of a willow tree lean to touch my shoulder as I pass under it, filling me with a sigh like sleep. I suppose that is why I like fantasy. Fantasy does not belong to a person, like my pebble or my walk or my summer - the story belongs to the characters. And since all fictional characters are simply an author breathing life into some perception of humanity, the story belongs to us all. Fantasy is not mine, or yours, or even the author's really. As it will never really be real, the most important gift it can give the world cannot be the true experience, but the metaphors for truths in all lives. Fantasy is universal.

My mind eases into the cool caverns of an autumn night along the river in the Golden Realms, the loose tunic of a knight. I un-clench my fists and wonder what, exactly, Kai would say if her rage at that monster came out in a full door-slamming way.

With my eyes fluttering, I feel my anger subsiding and pure exhaustion setting in. I begin to turn toward back home again, but then I see a lanky figure in a beanie walking with purpose across the empty street.

Just walking.

I stop.

He rounds the corner and I get this chill at the way his head was hanging low like he was watching something on the concrete and I turn and bite my lip for a moment and then take off through the willow branches and sprint across the street and my footsteps are too loud but he doesn't turn and everything is dark enough that the world moves like a stop motion movie as I run after those hunched shoulders.

"Peter!"

He keeps walking.

"Hey!"

Head down, shoulders up.

"PETER!"

The wind holds its breath. He turns until those catlike green eyes glow over his shoulder, two christmas lights in the shadows.

"Sam," he rasps. I step closer, and even in the grainy light, his bloodshot eyes and mussed hair are all too clear.

No sarcasm, no jokes, nothing. Just that hollow look, those empty, empty eyes. Something in me lurches.

"What are you doing here?" I whisper, keeping my voice low but not knowing why. The world had gone so incredibly still.

His brows furrow, like he can't quite remember either, and he shoves his glasses back up his nose with a sniff. "Looking for someone." Those skittering eyes meet mine for a second. "What are you doing here?"

"Getting away from someone."

He nods once.

We stand there for a little, watching the empty residential road like we're waiting for someone to come, but at some point we realise that we are very, very much alone. I shiver as the wind returns and the world grinds back into motion around me. I must have looked very cold, because, ever so tentatively, Peter wraps his arm around my shoulder. I hold my breath.

But all I feel is honesty as his fingers rest lightly on my arm, pulling me to the warmth of his side. There is something unnerving about standing alone on the sidewalk when the stars are hidden and the houses are dark, but his arm was like a tether to shore - like a buyee. I wasn't afraid anymore. And so, just as tentatively, I lean my head against the warmth of his shoulder. My mind clears like a meadow after the rain.

We don't talk - we don't have to - but when we finally part, and Peter turns the opposite way, and I let the willow's breath fill my lungs, I swear his head is just a little higher, the wind is just a little softer. Not fantasy - it's real as hell.

The path home isn't just walking anymore; with his eyes like gold in my memories, it's like flying.