Repose Memories (reposememories) wrote in repose, @ 2017-06-06 12:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | cris martin, dylan michaels, louis donovan, ~plot: memories |
[Memory]
What: Memory
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing it
Warning, this memory contains: Happiness and freedom
You laugh, and it's loud enough to bank off embankments. You don't know that word, embankments, but it would be fitting, you know, if you knew it. You throw your arms up into the air, and you whoop at the most perfect sky to ever be perfect. The sidewalk beneath your dirty kicks is a filthy kind of grey, and the black top isn't really black at all. It's like something white that you snuck into dirty washwater at the laundromat, leaving someone else's clothes soaking and dripping off the top of the coin-operated washer. You spent a lot of times in laundromats when you were a kid, and you remember the jostle of the machines with the same kind of fondness that you remember generic cereal over smiles and roughhousing at 2am. You don't know the word roughhousing either, but that doesn't matter. It's the right word in your head, even if your mouth doesn't know it.
You were never an encyclopedia or anything, which was a word you did know. It matched with the dusty old book that propped up the kitchen table leg. You never got the urge to open that old thing, which says more about you than it does about the state of the kitchen. Anyway, you aren't smart, and it was probably better you never read the book. You wouldn't understood outdated was outdated, and you would have walked around telling people with certainty that the world was flat or something.
Books were never your thing, and you hop along the sidewalk like you're younger than you are. You're young, don't get me wrong, you're young, but this is like young-young, and people walking by probably think you're nutso. You don't give a shit what people think. You never even look at their faces to see if they care. Today you care even less, because today you're free, and you feel it to your marrow. Okay, another word you didn't know, but it would work if you did, and you refuse to be limited by your lack of language. It was hard to be limited by a deficiency you didn't yet know you possessed.
But, the sidewalk. You've gone a mile or two, and you're not tired at all. You pass by the coffee shop you always wanted to try but never could, and you think about it. You're rolling in bank. The pockets of your jeans are filled to bursting. You must have 5k on you, and 5k is a million bucks to someone like you. But you're not stupid. Not smart isn't the same as stupid, and you don't stop. You don't even slow to look in the window to see if all the kids are in there being loud and tossing sugar packets everywhere. Those kids are younger than you now, but you don't feel old.
You're flying. Not really, but that's what it feels like, and you're young. Young, and your moms didn't raise no dummy; you go right to the bus station and buy a ticket West. Adios, fucked up shit, and when the bus comes you sit in the front and smush yourself in close to the window. Your backpack is in your lap, and it's mostly filled with mementos; you're not practical. You have a bunch of old romance novels, which don't count as books in your mind. You have an old bicycle light in there, and you have an old bicycle bell. You have a knife that was made by hand, and you have a ribbon that's so faded the yellow looks like cream. You have your moms' hairbrush, and you have your pops' favorite undershirt. You have birthday cards, a stack of them, all shitty and hand drawn; they're tied together with that ribbon. You have stolen tokens from every single laundromat you went to the year you were 8. You have snippets of blond hairs in varying shades, all held together with a rubber band.
You drag your fingers along the condensation on the window, and the grizzled old bus driver gives you a look through his mirror. You smile at him, and the guy holds out five seconds before smiling back. You reach into your backpack, and you pull out a fresh flower, one plucked this morning to symbolize your freedom, and you reach across the back of his seat and tuck it behind his ear. He's leathery of face, and he shakes his head, but he doesn't pull the flower from its holding place for two stops.
You're asleep by then, a hoodie that smells like one of your brothers is tucked beneath your cheek. You're smiling. You're free.