I live in a small town of maybe sixty people in all. There are a handful of places that are pretty cool to explore when you’re little and everything is big and new and wonderful, but it eventually gets old. Nobody ever leaves this place. They don’t move away, and no one ever moves in. the only new faces we see are either baby’s or tourists passing by on their way somewhere interesting. The only thing I’ve even heard of people no longer being here is when they disappear, a rather rare occurrence, but recently it’s happened, and no one knows where they’ve gone, or if they even went anywhere at all. I don’t like to think about it. I want to leave this town. I’ve always longed for adventure, of seeing all sorts of new things and learning how happiness works and feels again. I want to be able to breath. I hate everything about this town.
There was a time when I loved it here, and that time was the greatest for me, however it was all due to me being little. I figured I had everything I needed to be happy, there was my father, who raised me, and my brother, younger than me by a year, and I had a handful of friends to keep me company in school and at playgrounds. It was perfect. I may not have known my mother, and by some standards that’s something to feel sad about, but honestly it didn’t matter because I got to have my little family, and we were perfect just the way we were. My father had always made sure that we were perfect, or more than perfect or else the town would think less of us because of my missing mother, and there’s no way that my father would let that happen. He’s always been good at convincing people we’re perfect, I was so convinced back then. But then when I was twelve, something happened that made the perfect picture of my family break.
I was walking home one day with my best friend, Mara, when I said something that ended up being the lynchpin to the end of my life as I knew it.
“How about we go on an adventure instead of going home?”
Mara looked at me like I had a piece of broccoli that suddenly erupted from my head.
“Don’t give me that,” I rolled my eyes and laughed, taking her hand. “Lets goo!!”
She gave off the cutest yelp as I ran and dragged her over to the woods next to the middle school. We weren’t allowed in there, so it was one of the only places I’ve never explored and really, I’d been so bored of the same old places, I needed to find something new.
