12:44 a.m. - 2009-07-28
a story im working on
After that she slept in the tent. The darkness didn’t scare her but the possibility of what could be lurking out there did. So she went to her tent before the sun went down and she awoke with it. In the morning the air was still and quiet. The water on the lake was like a sheet of green glass. The world belonged to her. She left a note for her family on a paper towel and went for a long walk, across the road and up the hill. She was alone and not at all afraid. She felt welcomed by the fields of long grass, the insects that lived there sang their songs and she was a part of it. In the evening as her family gathered to watch movies in the living room she said her goodnights and went back to her tent. She was thirteen and she was brave. Sometimes at night she heard the horses and her heart would jump up into her throat. She’d think it was some kind of killer out there, but it wasn’t and she knew she was safer in the tent than in the house.
She had been in love with a boy but she ended up rejecting him. He had given her a bracelet with his name on one side and hers on the other and she never took it off her wrist. She couldn’t even put words to the terror she felt when he tried to kiss her, so she pushed him away desperately and awkwardly. She knew what was wrong with her but she didn’t know how to tell him. She didn’t know what to say. That was July and in another town, and this was August and she was back at the lake. The house there by the water belonged to her grandparents and her father had helped build it when he was a teenager. Her family went there every summer and it was beautiful. It was her home away from home. This summer was different. She was different. Her mind didn’t feel quite right anymore and she couldn’t really explain it, even to herself. It was things like the tent, and this feeling down inside of her that felt like anguish if she knew that word to describe it. It was things like July, and the image of the first boy she had really loved, the first boy that made her feel wanted and special and liked, the boy who she rejected in the rain, slithered from his twelve year old grasp, she had tried to explain. She wanted to write his name in the sky to declare once and for all that she loved him, because she did love him, or she would have if it weren’t for things like the tent and the feeling in her gut.
There were blackeyedsusans growing in the field there, and all sorts of other wild flowers too. She thought ragweed was a flower until she tried to bring some home to her grandma who was allergic to the weed. The horses came down to the water to cool off and after dinner she would feed the horses vegetable scraps and the cobs from the corn with her sister and brother. She loved the feeling when the horses teeth crunched into a cob she was holding. She loved the sound it made. The horses eyes were big and dark and so pretty. Their noses were soft and nice to pet and always moving, smelling, looking for food. She loved the horses. She loved the fish that swam in the water too and the frogs. Most of all she loved the trees. She felt somehow that they were watching her, looking out for her. She dreamed about them growing in the house, about the house going wild so that she could feel safe there.