Memories of a Boy, a Girl, and a Run-Down Theater

   Every bedtime story starts with once upon a time... a classic way to begin a story, yet somehow a cliche. Thankfully this is not how my story begins. No, mine starts at a run down theater in a too-small-town in between no-where and every-where. This is where I grew up, unfortunately...

   This theater is where I learned to dream, sitting behind the tattered red curtains and experiencing the cinema in a way that somehow, no one else did. I always managed to sneak a bucket of too salty popcorn from the too easy to bribe clerk at the front desk. I usually got away with it, seeing as though my dad ran this "fine establishment". My child-hood friend Thomas and I would run shrieking through the storage rooms and freak out the janitor as much as possible. Back then, the place had a magic that no one else saw but us, which only added to the novelty. 

    As we got older though, things began to change. While Thomas and I got closer, my Dad and I grew apart. I began to see that it was because I looked so much like my mother, who had died when I was very young. A freak accident, they said, when a rogue patch of lightning had struck a tree nearby, causing it to explode and flinging out several pieces of wood, lodging them into my mother's unfortunate spine. I remember the waiting, the painful hours slowly crawling by as we sat idly by in the  waiting room of the ER. Dad staring into oblivion, pain etched clearly across his face, and me having to be strong for the both of us. I remember the doctor's muffled words as he told us that she was not going to wake up, and Dad saying to take her off life support, that it was what she would have wanted. That was the last time I ever called him Dad...

     While Dad was stuck in his own little world, Thomas was my one and only comfort. It only made sense that we fell for each other as we got older. We'd sit on the roof of the  theater, our former playhouse, and talk for hours about how we would run away to the world we only saw in books or in our imaginations, how we'd go to the farthest college away from here and get married, have children, and whatever normal people did these days. On my sixteenth birthday, Tom, as I now called him, brought me a bottle of wine from his parents' cabinet and a sack of fireworks, bringing with him a grin that always got us in the worst kind of trouble... I should have known something would go wrong.

    We sat in an empty field, making promises we both knew we would never keep. By the time we started lighting up fireworks, we were both half-way drunk. As Tom clumsily set up a few Black Cats, I sat staring at the stars like they had the promise of tomorrow, and slowly, ever so slowly, I fell asleep...

    Swiftly after, I woke to the smell of burning and the sensation of Tom roughly shaking my shoulders. Blearily, I opened my eyes and asked him what was wrong. He yanked hard on my hand, yelling, "Come on, we have to go, the field is on fire!" That woke me up as if he had poured a bucket of water over of my head. While we shuffled out of the flames, we heard what sounded like a dog barking amidst the confusion. Tom sat me down once we got to safety, and ran back into the fray, saying he had to save the poor animal stuck in the hell we had just escaped. I yelped for him to stop, but it came out as a croak, and I was helpless to watch my only friend rush toward the gates of hell. As I waited for him to return I was taken by the darkness that had threatened before the fire had begun.

     I drifted for awhile, floating in and out of consciousness. The wailing sirens echoed in my ears as well as the doctors murmuring at the corner of my bed, "When we found her her alcohol level was extremely high." "A dog was found running around the fields without an owner." "Apparently a few sparklers were the cause of the fire." When I woke I fought the sedatives the nurses had given me to keep calm, and frequently screamed my questions to anyone who would listen. I was relieved to find out that Thomas was okay but there had been damage to the local theater nearby. Aka- I was in deep crap.

     Years later, I remain scarred by the event, the damage to the theater had been minimal, but I can still remember the fear that reverbrated through my mind when I had almost lost Thomas, and the theater we had shared so lovingly in our imagination. The place that had started out in our dreams had ended up in our nightmares. That night sometimes finds its way into my dreams, but this time Thomas doesn't come out of the flames, and our place of childhood memories remains in ashes. Then I wake up and realize that these details are not a dream at all, but a new reality. So I cry myself to sleep at night knowing that if I hadn't fallen asleep that maybe I could have warned Thomas, and the flames never would have started. But now I live in the realization that even something so innocent as a night of fun could end in a horror such as the one I have to live with for the rest of my life. Then looking upon the stars as though they held the  promise of tomorrow, I slowly, ever so slowly, fell asleep... dreaming of a boy, a girl, and a run-down-theater.