Authors Note: This is just a story I had to write for my English Portfolio at school last year (2012) and I liked it even though it is very different to what I normally write so I thought I'd upload it here and get some feedback. It's based of a couple real memories but the main character isn't actually 'me' and most of the events in the story didn't actually happen.
Dad was trying to talk to me again. I continued to ignore him, staring out the car window at the passing shop fronts closed up for the night. They looked abandoned. I turned up the music on my iPhone, Dad gave up and the traffic lights ahead turned red and the car slowed, then stopped. The song changed to A Sketch in Black and White by Eyes Set To Kill and a blue neon light outside in a shop window started to flicker and die and a smile slowly spread across my face as I remembered a different country and a different night...
The stereo was turned up really loud blasting Eyes Set To Kill but I could still hear Steve laughing as we sped down the Ballarat Freeway. He was driving as I tried to stop the overhead light flickering. He’d replaced the bulb with a blue one yesterday but the wiring was loose. I glimpsed the smile on Steve’s face as a flash of blue-tinted white, before the inside of the car was plunged into darkness again. The freeway seemed to stretch off into the night forever, as a snake of lights across a black plain. Worried thoughts flashed into my mind. Would this be the last time I night I could spend with Steve? I pushed the thoughts away so nothing else existed but Steve and I and the frenetic energy as we raced forward as one.
I felt invincible and free. I think on that night anything was possible. We had no destination in mind but that didn’t matter. We were moving forward, together. Getting away. Eventually we figured out where we were going, laughing at everything and nothing. Words didn’t matter either. What mattered was the connection we shared as energy bounced between us and fed by each other it grew. Our shared need for escape from the expectations placed on us in the daytime and the freedom we experienced in the dark meant we understood each other and what we needed to forget. Forgetting that my family was falling apart and that by the end of the week I would be in a different country, that this could be the last time we saw each other. That we had grown up and lost the carefree happiness of children. On that night we forgot everything so we could smile and laugh again. Grown up children.
I was suddenly jolted back to the present and my smile disappeared in an instant as if it had never been there. Dad parked the car in the driveway and I stared at my hands holding my phone. The song had ended long before but lost in memory I hadn’t noticed. The memory faded as I got out the car without a word and walked to the house, longing to have that freedom in the dark and to feel that blue-tinted happiness again.
