Late Night Chatter II

that was funny.

anyway, i found a fun picture of myself while cleaning. It's me in 8th grade with my green hair, I Ching necklace from my chinese penpal, my favorite smiley face t-shirt and the lace from my in-line skates that i used as a choker. I was a really bad skater kid... i found out years after i stopped that the kids i always went with just humored me because i was a girl. Once I was at an indoor skate part with them and I fell off a ramp onto my shoulder. It hurt so much but the worst part was that my shoulder wouldn't stop shaking. I temporarily paralyzed it or something. fun times! It really was fun. They wouldn't let me in the half pipe. I probably would have killed myself so they made a good judgement call there. I grew up in Milford, CT and it was somewhat utopian. It's that town where you walked outside and joined in on a game of kickball. Kids were always outside doing something. My back yard was a marsh of several acres. I would walk through the tall reeds, jump over snaking waterways and find little dead rodents. There was a big lake back there that took over an hour to get to, so it was like the destination that we never had time to hang out at. It was really creepy back there but that's what made it so magical. The ground was cracked like you see in documentaries about the dried up dessert lakes. It was due to the super-tide floods that only covered the ground with water once a month. All of that wetting and drying made the ground look space-like. It was also a place my parents didn't like me hanging out in. We had a tall brown fence that separated the marsh from the proper, grassed back yard. So when I was in there she couldn't see me. I found many snake skins back there. Sometimes homeless people would set up camps. We would always find 'rooms' made from tamping down the reeds in a circular fashion so there was a flat place in the middle suitable for a tent, a thrown away couch and a fire pit. When these places were stumbled upon my friends and I would get a rock in our stomachs and get really quiet for a few minutes. Then we pretty much ran as fast as we could to get the hell outa there. It's so funny, because in all of the times we hung out in the marsh, meandering through the paths, we never ran into an adult. We knew they were in there... I think the closest we ever came was when we were on the search for that big lake. We heard two men and then decided to head back home. It's never a good idea to run into strange men in the middle of a marsh, where at the age of 10 or 12, the reeds are taller than you. They'd never find the body. That still plays in my head, the fact that I could have been killed countless times during my childhood and I'm still here.