Fairy Tale Stars

It was the summer before life started.  Or, at least, that’s what we thought then, when we were still so young that we thought life begins at a particularly well-timed intersection of choices and dreams.  My best friend and I were lying with our stomachs flat on the pavement of an empty parking lot.  The ground was still warm in spite of the fact that it hadn’t seen the sun for hours.  Outside the parking lot, trees and hills climbed up the sky, towards the moon and the stars -- we didn't believe in heaven.  We were talking about everything that might happen once I moved to Chicago, but really we were writing fairy tales.  And, really, after I left that parking lot, the best stories I would ever write would carry the hard heat of that pavement in their words.  And really, everything I would ever love, I would love in stubborn opposition to that place that I had climbed up and out from, like those trees that had climbed up to touch the stars.  And I realize that I wasn’t trying to climb away from where I was from, but what had happened to me there and I realize that bad things can happen anywhere – and they did.  Now, six years later in New York, I don’t see stars at night; the city’s tallest buildings just scrape the blank slate black sky.