steep

The hill is steep.
You remember what your creative writing teacher said about steep hills. How they make for melancholy images.
The pavement is grey, like most old pavement. It is not the grey of rainy days, when the clouds weave their thick choking fingers over the sky. Rather it is the grey that the road before you is and has always been. You don't recall ever having seen a road that wasn't grey, unless it was black.
At the top of this hill is sky. The road stretches up at such an incline that you can see nothing at the top but the gray pavement leading off into that blue horizon. There are even some white puffy clouds, for God's sake.
You'd like to walk into the sky.
You get going. Your destination is the top of the hill, and climbing hills is always the same experience. The more you ascend, the more exhaustion like a rope around your heart pulls you back. It's a feeling of sudden weight in your feet; it's harder each step to lift your soles. You begin to wonder if you're moving at all. If you'll ever make it.
The trek is tiring.
The end of the street is a cul-de-sac. You look up at the heavens and wonder how it is you didn't reach them. You turn to the right, where your house is, brought back down to the earth, to the reality that you have homework to do and mail to get. The phone is ringing.
You open the back door, too late to catch the phone. Your dog is wagging her tail, sniffing your legs, catching hold of everything you've seen today, everything that passed you by. She needs to go out. You smile at her, and you remember all the balmy days this summer you could have taken her for a walk but you didn't want to face the outside world. That damn glaring sun. Those friggin puffy clouds.
You played computer games instead.
There was a lot you didn't do. You didn't get up. You stayed in bed until the afternoon some days. You didn't sleep. You lay awake and dreamed. You made your dreams while conscious to combat the raging tides of inconspicuous emotion. You never broke down. You never let it out, cried or screamed or raged against some inscrutable pain.
You never told her you loved her.
You sign online to check your e-mail. As the modem hisses and honks at you, you wonder if it carries with it some subliminal messaging. Some little voice heard only by your subconscious, assuring you that no one can see you on-line. No one knows who you are. It is not a network of computers with downloadable information. It is a place. It exists. You are safe here.
You have no mail.
You remember nights you sat until it was no longer night and drained your life away in front of this machine. You told your darkest secrets to a collection of binary digits and pixels. You drowned in a deadly quicksand of chat room pity.
You sign off.
You turn on Star Trek reruns, do your math homework. No one is home but you and the dog. You remember the long warm days when no one was around. You wished someone would have just called you, would have come over and watched all those movies with you.
Now you breath in the quiet.
No siblings to put up with. No family to foil carefully made plans. No phony people who pretend to be friends when they feel too guilty to tell you the obvious truth. You smile, you actually smile. You are happy, but no one knows it. They pity you and call you depressed and lonely and pretend to be your friend. They think you have problems to face, demons to kill. They try to kill them for you. Perhaps they mean to resurrect them. They don't know you found happiness in simple existence. They don't know you don't need them. They talk to you the way they always did and you think they talk to someone who died in a warm, cloudy, lonely summer.
You think of steep hills climbed and those laid before you.

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