freewrite 1

Julien didn’t like coming home. The entire town of Pedroia felt strange to him since the awkward commercial build of the early nines. A small town was trying to find an identity, but lacked the originality to make the bustling town a genuinely attractive place to live.

The new buildings were built on top of memories. The Wal-Mart, the Cost-co, the 7/11, the Applebee’s, all of them covered up a different place from Julien's past. A housing development overran the sled hill where he broke his arm in the second grade. Children played on the playground of a K-8 school that was built in a field he had nearly burnt down during an acid trip his freshman year of high school. An entire complex of huge chain stores now occupied the woods where he and his friends would get horribly drunk and sleep with girls for the first time in the back of his best friend Jimmy's Toyota 4-Runner.

Jose’s served very generic Mexican food. Jimmy opened up the place when he moved back to Pedroia after finishing his degree. It flourished because it was one of a few places in town before the chain restaurants were constructed. Julien knew he could get some free food and beer from his friend. He needed a favor, because he was out of money, save the eighty-four dollars left for his bus ticket back home.

The suburban town felt very strange after twenty-six years. He walked the streets expecting to see old friends or meet new people, but nobody ever seemed to leave their homes.

The only reason he had come home this time was to see his mother, who spent her days at the Centennial Valley Mental Health Center. This time she had tried to swallow too much of her sleeping medication. This was the fourth attempted suicide for his mother. He was the only friend she had after his step-father left four years ago. He felt guilty because he could not afford to take care of her, so he came to see her whenever possible.

Matt was Julien’s brother, and worked split shifts at Jose’s, living a block away. Matt was not a blood relative, as he came from a previous marriage, but he and Julien were the same age, and became great friends, and stayed so after the divorce, though Matt refused to see Julien’s mother. Matt constantly talked about moving away to a bigger city, but he never did, and likely never would. Julien didn’t mind this because it gave him a place to stay for free, albeit on a couch that smelled like cat piss.

There was a slight drizzle, and the wind had picked up, ripping through Julien’s hooded sweatshirt. He quickened his pace, but continued to look straight down at the ground so his glasses would not get too wet. Next to his right foot was a single-subject notebook flapping against a dying rose bush. Picking it up, he ducked under the awning of Jose’s. Sitting a bench that was dry, waiting the fifteen minutes or so it would be before Jimmy came by to open the place up.

The notebook was somebody’s journal. Not only did it contain many first person narratives describing relationships and drug-taking, it contained poetry and creative fiction. There was no name anywhere. Julien opened it up to a page near the middle. It was an untitled poem written in purple sharpie:

in a hope

three steps

from the floor

but a breath

three feet

from the cerebellum

...

shattered HEART.

it’s okay.

contagious tears

deprive speech

which allows

cries of

______________.

(emotion)

He smiled and shut the notebook, stuffing into his black and blue backpack. He lit a cigarette and tried to imagine whose notebook he had come across. He hoped it was a friend. He traveled the country trying to find someone that could write the way this person could. He was in love.