〆!! baby rover. childhood stories are so important to me
〆 for a childhood story
"Childhood, huh? There weren’t really very many… good stories from back then, y’know? Whenever somethin’ was going good, it always kinda.. uh, fell apart. ‘s why Lego Building’s pretty important, yeah? ‘Cause it’s the only thing that didn’t fall apart from back then.”
"If I had to tell you a story, though, it’d probably be… I dunno, I must’ve been maybe seven or something. It was ‘round the time I was let out of the hospital an’ I still couldn’t use my right hand. So I was.. I mean I was still really… upset and frustrated because I couldn’t do.. do anything. It’s—”
"… It’s humiliating, you know? Like not being able to… to even feed yourself without someone.. I mean I—”
The boy cuts himself off to groan, shake his head quickly, then look back up with a… less than convincing smile plastered across his lips.
"… That’s not important — what is important is the story, right? Yeah… yeah, keheh! So, right — somewhere around then Dad started comin’ out to stargaze with Mom and me. It wasn’t really a special night, like nothin’ super different than usual, but it was the night I kinda realized I was… super lucky? Dad had a pile of library books beside him, and he kept muttering stuff about the summer triangle while Mom threw Corn Pop’s at me and I tried catching them with my mouth. We’d moved into our first apartment around then too, so we had to hike up this small path to get to a hill far enough away that we could see the stars.”
"It had a really shitty view — looked straight into an abandoned elementary school. Blocked out windows, walls covered in graffiti, a firepit surrounded by trash kids would leave around. The playground was falling apart —the only good part of it was a really sweet tire swing that still worked, sounded like a horror move too— and I’m pretty sure a family of raccoons made a nest under one of the portables. Keheh, our neighbour was reeeal sketchy, but it was all Mom and Dad could really afford after prosthetic junk.”
“Anyway, ‘s totally sappy but that night I kinda realized that stuff didn’t really matter? That things fell apart? Or stuff like we had to pick up cans we found around if I wanted a candy bar, or sometimes we wake up in the middle of the night ‘cause someone set off fireworks at 3am again, or Mom had to help me eat and put on clothes, ‘cause? I got to learn how to make a can-castle, and I knew where the cheapest candy bars around town were —this real tiny convenient store waaaay out near where the city ended, right next to a Five Guys’—, I saw the neatest fireworks for free, and I had an excuse to play toss-n-bite games whenever I wanted.”
"But the biggest thing was realizing how lucky I was to have Mom an’ Dad as… my Mom an’ Dad. Like, it didn’t really matter what happened next, long as I had them, y’know? They were always there at the end of everything, good or bad or whatever.”
"Keheh, you should meet ‘em, they’re kinda like magic — they can take something as simple as your average city night sky and make it the coolest thing in the world."