Endless Breath
Jenny’s mother was faintly schizophrenic, of this I was sure. The woman never really talked to me or Sam when we visited our friend and her fifty-plus exotic birds always pooped all over the floor when they weren’t attacking my bare feet. It was for this reason that the three of us, that is, Jenny, Sam and I, would often spend our visiting hours outside the house. Rain or shine, snow or heat, we would start at the front of the sallow, red bricked house at the crooked, lithe tree, and work our way round back to the brush piles among the tall weeds that brushed up against thick woods like the feathery fringes of an old sweater against the blackness of a shadowed closet.
Despite our ages of twelve to thirteen, Jenny being the oldest and I the youngest, we allowed our imaginations to weave tales while remaining unashamed of our immaturity and unbiased by the surrounding wanton need to grow up of our peers. It was one of the few times in my life where I felt truly happy, and I mean that in the best way possible. It wasn’t that I was specifically unhappy the rest of the time, but it was moments with my friends, letting my mind run fast and my legs run faster, where things felt perfect. Nothing could possibly be out of place in those precious breaths—not one strand of my hair in its signature ponytail, not one leaf or rain drop or flake of snow, not one loud chuckle or mostly harmless punch, not even my obnoxious habit of overanalyzing everything I saw would ruin these priceless sections of time.
When my mother dropped me off, uneasy as always when it came to letting me stay at Jenny’s house overnight with that psycho mother of hers, I refused a coat or a change of clothes for the next day. Just me was all that got out of the green truck, and I crunched footprints into the sugar-cube snow on my way over to the door. Before my knuckles rapped on the plastic, cheap barrier, Jenny’s face was unveiled from the inside of the questionably sanitary abode. I smiled back and we stepped inside long enough to let my mother retreat from the driveway to return to our stuck-up, upper-middle-class neighborhood.
“Jennifer!” rasped out her mother from the other room, likely the master bedroom. Jenny flinched and made a face that conveyed all of her thoughts.
The crazy bitch has been harassing me all day. Let’s go before she asks me to clean up the kitchen or something, I interpreted. At that I glanced into the kitchen and saw the counters coated with a sickly combination of dried coffee and birdseed. Dishes were stacked in the sink and the African-whatever-bird named Elissa was perched on the back of a chair, staring me down. Last time I went near it, the damned thing tried to bite my legs off, despite its size of approximately eight inches in height.
I shot Jenny my well-known smirk as I backed silently into the door, allowing her exit from her mother’s jurisdiction—just by virtue of the fact that the woman was way too damned lazy to follow Jenny outside. I leaned against the tree not ten feet from her front door that seemed to twist up out of the ground like opening petals of a spring flower. It was here that we would wait for Sam. Jenny sat on the stained wooden bench almost directly in front of me and we admired the gray skies and equally gray earth, the once white snow beautifully scarred with the mixture of mud and pollution. Feelings of trust welled up in my chest as we confided in each other our teenage insecurities. We cut ourselves open and spilled our wildest dreams and most haunting nightmares. We could be completely serious and nonsensical with the exact same set of words, and often we meant our sentences in both ways. What could have been minutes or hours passed, and I heard tires slow on the road behind me. I moved not a centimeter as I listened to Sam’s clumsy disembarking from her mother’s champagne-colored car.
The bounce in Sam’s step was obvious to both eye and ear, and the crunch crunch crunch of snow beneath her long feet made me smile faintly.
“Hey Sam,” Jenny called out as Sam’s mother was disappearing back to their not-so-stuck-up and not-quite-upper-middle-class-neighborhood. The continued crunching of snow and silence let me know she was waving, and I waved back, a genuine smile on my face when I finally unglued my eyes from their fixed position. Sam had a sucker in her mouth and a dark green canvas book bag slung over her shoulder. I already knew the contents of it were not clothes, but her drawing pad that she never went anywhere without, a pen of some sort, a couple pencils, and some CDs I’d burned her some while back. When Sam had set her bag onto the bench that Jenny was no longer resting on, I stuffed my hands in my pockets and we meandered our way around the garage at the end of their driveway that was not attached to the house. My brown corduroys made that swish swish sound as my heels created skid-marks on the freshly settled snow.
“Why did you decide that being partners with that kid was a good idea?” I asked Jenny, that familiar I’m an asshole and I’m okay with that tone in my voice. She shrugged and ran feminine fingers through brown-almost-black shoulder length hair.
“I thought it was a nice thing to do,” she responded. I raised my eyebrows for a split second, having not considered that as an option. “But then he just started handing candy out to kids to try and get them to be his friend. It’s ridiculous and I ended up doing all the work,” I let out a huff of the beginning of a laugh, the rest continuing inside my head instead of my lungs.
“That’s why you should have switched to Cluster Eight with us,” Sam chimed in with her perpetually good, although often difficult mood. Mind you, our middle school had large rooms divided into smaller sections/classes, called “clusters”. Eight graders were either in Cluster Seven or Cluster Eight.
“Well I didn’t think I was going to be surrounded by idiots,” Jenny shot back almost defensively. I let a grin play across my features as I gave Jenny a kind look through my eyes.
“There are idiots no matter where you go. The worst thing to know is that sometimes you are one of them,” Sam nodded silently in agreement although I doubted she understood what I meant from deep inside my soul. By this time the three of us were behind the house, working our way on the path past the tacky above-ground-pool that was covered for the winter and into the weeds that were weighed down with the burden of thick snow. I snow reminded me of these feelings of despair that would often overwhelm me in school or at home, and I took comfort in noticing that those conflicting and confusing emotions were currently absent.
“We should go camping for like a week out here in the summer,” Jenny gestured to the woods.
“Camping?” I inquired. I had never been camping in my life, and still have not been to this day.
“It would be awesome. We could make costumes and play out here with our swords and stuff,” Jenny started. Sam wore her goofy smile.
“That would be really fun. We should see if we could do it,” Sam’s dirty blonde hair, slightly longer than Jenny’s, framed both sides of her face as she tilted her head upwards to examine the tips of the naked trees. I wandered off in a different direction.
“I’ve always wanted to go camping for like a week, just to see how I’d hold up. It’s not like my house isn’t right there,” Jenny carefully stepped over piles of brush or discarded plywood.
A peculiar, throaty scream pierced both of their thoughts. Blonde and blackish strands feathered out on the whimsical breeze as their heads snapped in my direction. Sitting on the still slightly muddy ground I realized from the raw feeling in my throat that the scream had come from me. I blinked once, twice, three times.
“Are you okay?” Jenny gave me a concerned look and the two stepped over what standing weeds were left to see what was wrong with me. I quickly assessed my body and realized that my right wrist was screaming in aches that formed their own beat, but I dismissed it as at most a sprain from landing on it badly. My feet were cold, but I could feel warmth in the soul of one of them. I lifted up my left leg and out of my constantly present Chuck Taylors was a nail at least three inches in length, with a block of wood skewered on the end of it.
“Huh,” I said. Jenny’s eyes went wide and darted from my face to my foot. Sam cocked her head to the side and examined my reaction. A moment ago I was screaming, sure, but now?
Now I looked irritated. “I’d better be fucking up to date on my tetanus shots,” I growled and crossed my shoe with the block of wood now nailed to it over my right leg. My ass was getting cold from sitting on the ground and I feared that when I stood up I’d have mud all over my brown corduroys.
“Do I need to get my mom?” Jenny worriedly spouted. I smirked again, firmly gripped the browned chunk of wood, and roughly ripped the nail from both the thin rubber of my shoe and the tender flesh inside. I discarded the scrap behind me without examining it.
“I’ll probably be fine. Let me just check it out real quick,” I said nonchalantly while untying my shoe and exposing my Halloween sock. The black on bottom of the sock didn’t say either way if there was blood there, but the sudden cooling sensation on the bottom of my foot made me bet that there was. I plucked the sock off my foot and craned my head to look at the bottom. There was a blood splotch around a very small hole. I poked, prodded, and squeezed the area around it. It was a little inflamed, but I chalked that up to the muscle being pissed off at whatever had invaded the flesh. Blood was not actively flowing from the puncture, so I shrugged my shoulders and re-dressed my foot. Rubber concealed any hole that was in the bottom of my shoe, and I stood.
“It’s a little sore, but it will probably be fine,” I cocked my head sideways and grinned at my two best friends.
That was good enough for Sam, who was walking around again, heading towards the garage. Jenny and I followed and I didn’t even feel the need to limp, despite the occasional wrench in the muscle on the bottom of my foot that almost made my cry out. I was a tough girl, and tough girls don’t feel pain. That was probably also the reason as to why I was outside in winter in a t-shirt for a long period of time. My arms had goose bumps, but I didn’t mind as the numbness washed the feeling away. The same would happen to my foot.
The rest of the afternoon continued without interruption of our fun. Upstairs in the garage, which held discarded sofas and a broken TV, we jumped and ran around, sang and laughed at each other, and swung from the rafters on the ceiling while discussing philosophy or politics or something equally wasteful of time, seeing as though we had lots of it to spare.
Days like that were blissful to me—gifts from God, if I should choose to believe in one. I like to tell myself that I disliked my friends back then more than I appreciated their different style. I like to remind myself that I screwed them all over before I moved because Jenny was full of herself and loved to get my sympathy, and Sam was too busy trying to be difficult and stubborn to listen to a damned thing I was saying. I wash away the longing for that feeling of trust that I have not felt since those days with a reprimanding memory of “Well we aren’t rich like you!” the one thing that they would say to bring me down whenever I thought I had a bone to pick with someone.
Despite all of these things, there is no hiding that moments like those were similar to the crisp, fresh winter air I would feel in my lungs when I stepped out from Jenny’s claustrophobic house. Back in those days, I could breathe freely without guilt or loss. Back then, when my visits would come to a close I remember I would wish that they could start all over from the beginning, and just repeat forever. I could always breathe in fresh air, and I would never have to stop. An endless breath, an escape from the mundane world that I knew I would have to face someday when I left all that behind. Now the crisp air does not quite fill my insides with excitement or the yearning for adventure as it used to, but makes me cough and hug deeper into the coat that I’d finally started wearing when I was fourteen. That endless breath still escapes me to this day, but once in a while I feel like I can still get a whiff of that cold breeze up my nose from my memories.
