The Walk
Stepping outside, Laura was oblivious to what many would call a perfect summer day. She didn’t care, just wondering why she was putting off the inevitable for a while longer. In her head it was just something that she wanted to do, take one last walk through the park.
It was interesting to Laura all of the memories that starting bubbling back to the surface, yet emotionally she felt nothing. She remembered her one-time best friend, Jane, whom she shared her dream of being a singer with when she was ten years old. She thought they would be best friends forever, but then came high school when Jane landed with a different group of girls, pushing Laura aside, and for only reasons kids might know, Jane decided that high school would be a time to make fun of Laura’s interest in music instead of being her friend. Eventually Jane’s family moved away from the neighborhood, but as Laura was making her way past Jane’s old house, she couldn’t remember the fun times they had together when she was ten, only the dark times that high school created with their old friendship.
As she was walking, Laura also didn’t see the flowers growing in front of the Birkster’s house, the ones that she helped Mrs. Birkster plant one summer so she could make a few dollars to buy some compact discs. The flowers seemed to be reaching out to her, asking Laura to come back and smell them, almost hoping she would pause for a minute to see there were some good things in life, but Laura didn’t hear anything they had to say.
She crossed the street to the park, past that sledding hill and towards the field house. She remembered being bundled up in the winter, pulling her sled up to the top, and the exhilaration of freedom as the plastic saucer would careen down the hill. The exhilaration would quickly turn to discouragement as her father would somehow find criticism in her sledding. Other fathers would be hugging their sons and daughters, exclaiming, “Great job!”, but Laura’s father always had the demeanor that taking her sledding was a chore. The only way he could enjoy the father-daughter time was by making sledding a competition, that Laura needed to come down faster than the other kids, make a smoother finish, anything that would show she was the best “sledder” on the hill.
It was just another memory that Laura wanted to erase.
The walk past the sledding hill seemed to take hours in her head when she came upon Ben, sporting a giant smile, and heard him say, “Good morning!”
A robotic, small smile, like a Pavlovian response, formed on Laura’s face, but she didn’t say a word.
“Why can’t I be happy like that guy?”, she thought?
As she approached the field house and the sprinkler park, Laura’s thoughts shifted briefly to her mom, and how on days that her father was out of town, her mom would take Laura to play with the neighborhood kids. It was a treat that her father would have no part of it, especially since it cost a dollar to enter. For a minute she thought if anyone might miss her, it might be her mom, but the thoughts changed to disappointment that her mom would never stick up for her.
Walking past the sprinkler park, Laura made her way through the baseball diamonds not noticing the boys playing ball. A fly ball rolled past her feet, “A little help!”, a boy shouted, but she just kept walking forward, oblivious to the ball, the boys, and the request. Towards the east side of the park she continued where the train tracks created a barrier between the park and the world to the east. Laura remembered playing on the tracks with Jane before they put the fences up to try and stop the kids from playing around the trains.
As she neared the tracks there was a bench.
Laura sat down.