When we were kids, we would ride our bikes home from school, turn sharp into the driveway and jump off, legs still pumping. We’d run out behind the rows of identical suburban houses and crash into the scraggy strip of woods that lay there. We’d have a secret path that we imagined was once traveled by bootleggers. We’d run through the branches and stop dead when the trees ended, then drop to our knees and part the grasses like deer. We’d find our spot and press down a mat of plants and just lay there, looking at the sky. We’d stretch our thin small bodies as wide as we could, ribs pushing against skin, our lungs full to bursting, blood pushing through our veins so loud we could hear the sound the individual cells made as they rushed through our bodies. We’d lay there and sweat in the bright light, and feel the bugs and flecks of dirt and chaff stick to our arms and legs. We’d lay there, just watching sky, imagining we were where we wanted to be.

Note: This was published originally on the 28th of July 2003, by myself. I called it “Someone Else's Story”. I wrote it, as is the case with much of my old writing, during a time where I was heavily abused, and my coping mechanisms were to hide myself even deeper.

There's a lot of this in my old writing, this theme of not being where I wanted to be, not the person I knew I was, didn't have the life that would let me thrive. But all that's over now, and I do have the life I always wanted.

So I suppose the title still fits, doesn't it? It's someone else's story because I am where I wanted to be.