There’s no place like home. I hadn’t realized this until I left searching for something unknown: I left searching for something better than what I used to know. As I walked alone through the claimed pavements of New York, cars scurrying like mice to get to a destination, beams of dismality reflecting off my Snow White skin, I had known only one thing: Once I would reach my own destination, I would never go back to Auntie and Uncle.
Fifi, an irksome ball of fur that I call my own, barks at every car that zooms by. He’s the only company I have rather than the Devil on my left shoulder and the angel on my right. It was the Devil’s decision that brought me here, stranded, with nothing but a small amount of change. I had spent all my money on the toys that made me who I am now.
I relive the past few days in my mind. I’ve enjoyed the company of the three aberrant, yet strangely familiar, people I encountered while on my escapade. Willie, the conceited and moronic victim of Mary Jane, told his stories about the crows that mocked him when he was flying high. They would tell him he had no brain. He believed them, and lived the rest of his life on the streets of Manhattan as a stupid man.
Tim was anything but heartless. He fell to crank after his love left him, leaving him alone, like me, and on an adventure that doesn’t end. His ambitious journey doesn’t rest in New York; he’s hoping his fragile, glass bones could take him all the way to the big city: Los Angeles. That’s where he used to live. I think he’ll give out before he reaches New Jersey.
I won’t ever forget Leon. It was his courage that sprung out to me like a lion of the wilderness. I wonder if that’s where he got his name, “Leon”, and why he’s another wanderer of the unknown. If it wasn’t for his addiction to dope, I would suspect he lived a life far beyond mine.
I snap back to reality as headlights blind me and Fifi is barking again. I don’t realize that I am standing directly in front of a semi-truck until I am hit. The feeling is like no other high. The wind is more noticeable, and my weightless body flies through the air, up and over the monster, like the crows that Willie spoke of. It is the first time I feel free from the life I once owned. The pain hits me everywhere, but I try to ignore it and live my last milliseconds of life without any worries.
The ground is my deathbed, or so I wanted it to be. I wanted the feeling of concrete to be the only thing I felt. I close my eyes and let my hair fall over me like a disastrous waterfall. Something wet surrounds me. My curiosity let loose, and so I opened my eyes to find myself in a pool of a beautiful, red something, and I see it’s escaping my soul. Fifi is beside me. For the first time, he isn’t barking. He probably already left for Doggie Heaven. Goodbye, Fifi.
Why am I not dead yet? Or am I? Sirens. I hope these sirens are coming from the trumpets of H*ll: I don’t deserve the luxuries of Heaven. I smile in my pain and wait for my outcome. The feeling of death is lovely.
Hands, all over me, there are hands. A loud cry fumbles out of my broken throat at the sudden feeling of pain and shards of broken glass ripping the inside of my body as a man picks me out of my desirable misery. As he effortlessly lifts me and cradles me like a baby, my red sneakers fall off. They were my favorite, but I probably don’t need them to get home.
He takes me to another world, a world full of wrongness. This world then transfers me somewhere over the rainbow, into a place I’ve been to before when I broke my arm. I lay in a bed, people everywhere, and I wonder if Auntie and Uncle will find me and rescue me, and take me back home, where I belong.