When Things Were Bigger and Lasted Forever

     When your home was a castle, so extensive that you forgot what certain corners looked like. You’d travel up stairs, transported to a new plane of existence, where you could escape the yelling from the world below... Behind your bedroom door, you’d sit and do the things that now you consider boring. When you had an older brother who was a big brother. When you felt you and him were soul mates, and the pain it was to see him leave; a soul mate die. You thought it would last forever, and that first hit that would begin a lifelong assault on a heart you put your hand to every day to salute a flag, mumbling words you forgot, standing among friends who you thought would last forever too.

     When going to Blockbuster was a vacation on Friday nights. You’d pick out your movie from the stacked shelves, a library you didn’t mind being in. When you saw the rounded sides of the bright colored plastic sleeves that held movies, something you didn’t have to read. When sitting in front of the TV on those nights with your family, a tradition you wanted to be an adult for so as to drink those drinks your parents drank. And you wished you could laugh like they did, or speak the words you didn’t know about yet. When things were sweet and so was the ice-cream you ate every night.

     When a visit to your grandparents was also a trip to the candy store. When you ate boxed chocolates like that guy from the movie your parents rented at Blockbuster all the time. And like Forest Gump, you could run like the wind on the playground — beat all those kids just to lose in the end in a foot race with your best friend. He was the fastest. And you loved that guy with all your heart, ‘cause he was not only the fastest but the best at everything you had no interest in. When you sat next to him and felt that friendship and smelled that hair gel in his hair, the kind all the kids used to prop up their front strands.

     When your grandma died and the treats at her house didn’t seem so sweet anymore. When at the funeral you realized that things aren’t like the redwoods or tortoises you saw on the nature channel. You thought that adult was big like the red wood, hardy like the tortoise. And you cried in the pews knowing full well that you’d be crying like your mom as she watched hers being carried away. In time, you’d watch the giants that created you be killed by Mother Nature or that thing you heard called diabetes that runs in your family. When the chocolates were no longer a treat, and you started eating your vegetables. When you fought a bit less with the giants and started being reasonable. When everything became smaller as you grew and old places revisited had shrunk to a size in which you realized…there is no magic.