There and Back Again

Listening to: Dinner at Eight (Keane)
Pondering: The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. (Tom Clancy)

I was going through my old disk files and found a bunch of unfinished short stories. This here is one of them. I wonder where I was going with this, or what inspired me to write this one…

I once knew a very sad girl who lived in a house with a controlling father and a depressed mother. I’ll name her Tess after that miserably sad and socially tortured Thomas Hardy character, Tess of D’Urbervilles. Tess was my best friend, the only person I ever did get along with when I was younger. Perhaps it was because we were both miscast characters of a play that is life. We were both loners, longing to find place that does not seem to exist. Both longing for a little corner in the world where we might belong, where our dreams and aspirations would seem accessible and our hearts happy as could be allowed. Whether I found that place or not now that I am in my mid-30’s is not relevant. The story I am going to tell is the story of Tess - my dearest, oldest friend who I miss so terribly and who I will always remember as the young girl with flowers in her hair, smiling to a world that seemed to have abandoned her.

I was ten when my family moved from the bustle of the city to the peaceful bliss of the countryside. The move was very stressful to me. Having been born with a bad pair of lungs, I was a sickly kid who was always in quarantined bed rest and home-schooled by my mother who was a teacher by profession but retired from the trade when he married my doctor father. I have no sisters but have an older brother, Eduardo who was much, much older than me to ever be a playmate. When he was in his teens, he enrolled in the military academy and I saw less and less of him. So growing up, it seemed like it was always just me and my mother and occasionally my father though my earliest memory of him was as my doctor, leaning over me, checking my pulse, my dilated pupils and my breathing.

Bronchitis and pneumonia bugged me down every other month or so ever since I was born. This hindered my growth in height and weight. I was too young to remember but I’m sure it worried my mother and father that when I was five, I looked like I was two and when I was seven, my clothes were still from the five-year-old section. Luckily, things picked up when I was ten, and the thought that I might grow up to be an anorexic midget was dispelled. It was the same time that father decided to move his private practice to his old roots thus, the move to the coast side town he grew up in where big shot doctors like him might be needed.

Tess was the only kid of our new next-door neighbor. As a matter of fact, she was the only kid within a ten-block radius. Weird. Tess was older than me by two years and like me, she was always smaller than her age so that mother thought she was the same age as me. She knocked and introduced herself two days after we moved in. Said she was checking in on behalf of her parents who, unfortunately, were too busy to come despite really wanting to meet the new family. My mother was taken by her gracious manners and eloquence in speaking, two things I didn’t get a chance to develop as the only person I ever hanged out with was mother. All the while, I was admiring the crown of flowers she was wearing on her head. She made it using wild flowers she picked here and there. It made her look almost like she came straight from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with ragged clothes and shoes. If only she were barefoot, it would have been so appropriate.