adventures

also today i was searching for my childhood in the forest.

i was searching for all the places we used to play: the ditch that was perfect for attempting bike tricks, the half-buried well that made us believe a house must have stood there at one point and then maybe burned down because of some terrible thing, the treehouses (if you could call them that) that we built ourselves from wood and tools stolen from our parents' sheds, the pit that the older boys always tried to jump on their bikes, the marsh that meant you reached the edge of the woods, the yard of that one man who called the cops on us one time for being loud, all the paths that were so beaten down and seemingly permanent from our footprints day after day after day...

we spent our summers in that forest.

only now all of that is gone. i was looking and looking. i got a bunch of scrapes and cuts from looking. i think i might have poison ivy.

i couldn't find any of it.

i thought that maybe the paths were just overgrown because none of the kids in the neighborhood now play in the woods like we used to. or i thought that maybe i just didn't know where to look anymore (because every time i thought i was getting close, i came upon somebody's house instead). either way it would be a terrible tragedy.

then i had to come inside because one of my cuts was bleeding a lot.

and then my mom asked me what i was doing, and i told her, and she told me that all of it is gone because now it's houses. i did know where to look - it's just not there anymore.

and that is one of the saddest things i can think of.

every kid should grow up with a forest to have adventures in.