Existing No Longer

This is true.

I was six. My best friend Ryan, who lived at one end of the trailer park, me at the other, were playing one spring afternoon.
I proposed we go on an adventure through our neighborhood.
'You know,' I said. 'A real adventure. Like Indiana Jones or something.'
So we asked permission from our parents and they smiled, condescendingly, but still adoring. Asked where we were going and when we'd be back. And said yes.
Ryan's mom packed us a lunch. With Capri Suns. I remember this because she only gave us one apiece and I loved Capri Suns as a kid, except they were too expensive for my family budget and they were small. Unsatisfying. I craved them, constantly.

We left.

I remember, I brought my Burger King Halloween Bucket and Ryan brought his backpack so we could save any treasures we found. I don't remember what we put inside them, maybe pennies, or bits of broken plastic or strange insects. In my head, things get muddled. Sometimes it's everything. Sometimes it's empty white, bucket. I'll never be sure of the truth.

We went up to the middle of the park and then doubled back, trespassing through our neighbor's backyards.
I was so excited. Ryan seemed nonplussed, but went along with it.
He was kind of a boring kid that liked pro-wrestling and shitty cable television.
I didn't have cable or my antennae didn't get reception. Essentially, no TV at all.

He had a Sega Genesis, I had a Super Nintendo. But he had cooler games, somehow.
I had Kirby's Avalanche and Rampart and Jurassic Park.
He had Sonic the Hedgehog and Jurassic Park too, only in his, you could be a velociraptor and eat people.

We had the same shitty, faux-mullet blond haircuts.
Ryan lost his baby teeth first.
I bit my nails. I think he did too.
We both liked Power Rangers.
My favorite color was green. His was red or blue.

I first met Ryan when my mother met his and we went over to his house and I played in Ryan's room. Within five minutes of knowing Ryan, we were crawling under his bed and suffocating in the huge piles of clutter. We were instant friends.

And it seemed perfect, crawling under bushes and hopping fences in stranger's backyards. TV was boring anyway. These adventures were the memories I'd always treasure. Somehow, I knew that already, as I created them. I knew the moment was special.

We hadn't been hiking for twenty minutes before we propped ourselves up behind someone's air conditioning and quickly ate all our snacks. I was still hungry. I remember that.

The place we rested was shaded and tranquil. A little tangerine tree, painted white. The hum of the air conditioning. The suck, suck, sucking sound of the Capri Suns.
I wanted to stay there forever.

And yet . . . I was disappointed that this was all our adventure had been so far. A twenty minute walk and a mediocre meal.
We hadn't even gone anywhere new or exciting. We were behind a trailer that was next to my babysitter's. I knew where I was.
And still, I went back to the peace I felt, however mild it was. For several years, I'd often revisit that place.

And then we heard footsteps and the home owner yelled at us and we ran off.

So far, we hadn't fought any monsters, like the ones in my favorite video game, A Link to the Past. No Octoroks or Moblins or anything. Just shady, crab-grass infested backyards. We hacked at bushes with sticks.

We went to the far reaches of the trailer park, a place I'd never been before. The very last trailer home was lopsided against a cul-de-sac and the front yard was completely filled with a giant prickly pear cactus. A forest of prickers and green discs.
We threw rocks at it, tearing up the fruitless crowns, bleeding out its juices all over.
I got paranoid that we'd get caught again. But we didn't.
And something about destroying that prickly pear was incredibly surreal.
I vowed to come back one day and finish its destruction. I really did. I don't know why.
And I returned once, many years later, and it was gone.
Maybe it never existed.

It's hard to say what happens to memories so long discarded. Maybe we never went on an adventure, maybe we didn't drink Capri Suns or get yelled at and maybe Ryan didn't exist at all.

It had been an hour or so. We were already exhausted little explorers.
We came upon an empty lot, the large concrete slabs where abandoned trailerhomes used to stand, until they were excavated and dragged away. Existing no longer.

Ryan found a dead bird laying on the slab and dared me to touch it. A dead morning dove, curled up in withered defeat. Existing no longer.
I said, no way.
Ryan reached inside the ribcage and pulled out an organ. Right through the skin. It was easy.
'Look,' he said. 'It's a heart.'
But who knows, it could have been a liver or a lung or something. All I know is it was a quarter-sized ball of red and violet and it leaked.
He dared me to touch it.
'No way,' I said.
Ryan threw it at me and I screamed.
He put the entrails in my bucket and we took it home.
We got back to my room and went through our treasures, which honestly, had to be the most worthless shit ever. I don't remember any of it. None except the organ, kinda drying up, kinda sticking to the side of the bucket.
Ryan left it at my house when he left, and I had to clean it out.

That's the end.

The thing about retelling a story, is, in the gaps of the temporal lobe, we fill in the holes.
With age, more gaps formulate. More are filled.
Some true, some lies, but it doesn't matter. Whatever changes occur, we make them the truth.

Since this is the first time I've told this story in 13 years, there were many gaps to fill.
I actually sit here, wondering, if any of it happened the way I think it did.
I think it did.
I nearly forgot it happened at all.
But retelling the story has changed it, the way you cannot observe anything in nature without yourself influencing the observed. I've changed this story beyond repair. In a way, the original events never existed. In truth, this story exists no longer.