Wishing on Stars, Praying for Miracles [1]

Spoiler! :

This is actually my first attempt at explaining a part of my past, and I'm not afraid to admit that it's personal. There will be more to come.

...I stepped from the musty school bus and greeted the spring air with a deep inhale. It smelled of the year’s first rain and sweet peach blossoms. But I only smelled isolation and pain. My good personality had been left among the reek of adolescents. I was still until I felt the wind fighting against my back and could no longer bare the sun’s harsh rays. I took long deliberate strides through the white, cheap, broken fence that harbored my insanity.

The lawn hadn’t been mowed for two years, thickets, tumble weeds and sprouting poplars littered the once vibrant grass. I had wrestled there; I had chewed that grass and had hoped to become a stallion to fly from this desolate valley. I had spent many sleepless nights there, lying out, counting the stars with my brothers and talking of the many things we’d once be, the places we would live, the lives we would change. That was another universe; maybe those times still linger among the same glittering stars, but they were unimaginable now. The only mentionable presence was now a rusting barbeque grill with a missing leg. The sun glinted off of the crumbling, ancient metal reminding me of blood clots.

Shaking the image from my mind, I walked up the porch and rested my hand on the flaking golden doorknob. I turned it slightly and then remembered that it never latched anyway and harshly pushed the door open the rest of the way. The house smelled very stuffy, and faintly of negligence. I only smelled the stuffiness, because the nose has a way of throwing away familiar scents, and we all smelled of abandonment here...