Porch Step

I'm sitting on a porch step, outside an old house with a sagging roof top. The shingles, now a faded caramel brown, droop down at the middle like the unbalanced layers of a chocolate cake. The door, a faded and cracked rectangle of wood, with only scattered spots of paint, is barely hanging from the rusty shingles. The windows hold only bits and pieces of glass in them, and the porch step in which I sit on, is old and worn out cement. I've been here before, a lot of times. It is my home, only this is not the way it was before. This place is old, weary, soundless except for the creaking floorboards and loose shingles. Leaning against the wall is a bicycle. My bicycle. The white one with green flowers. Only this bicycle is rusted and scratched and beat up. What is this place? What has happened to it, to all I've known?

I begin to walk down the sidewalk, the one I've walked down for the past years of my life. The past years. That's it! I'm in the future. This is my neighborhood in the future, only I haven't aged. I walk by my neighbor's house. Theirs is old and worn out as well. I ring the doorbell, but nobody answers, so I walk in. The entire house is dusty, unkempt, and faded. I walk to their kitchen, where I ate sandwiches and punch with a dear friend of mine for many summers gone by. Where is everybody? Where is her mother, with her blond hair and white smile? Or her brother, a frisky little thing, always seeking play? They are all gone.

I make my way up their stairs to my friend's room. The room is bare except for an aged mahogany chair, a cracked window, and a frame. The frame holds a paper inside- a certificate. A doctor's certificate. She became a doctor, just like she always wanted to. I smile. I remember her will, her dream to save lives, to do something useful with her own. That is why she is gone. She became a doctor. But then- why I am I still here? What happened to my dream?

Terrified, I run out of the house and go to the next one. No one is there, but a lawyer's certificate hangs on the wall. That person wanted to be an attorney, and so they left to become one. I run out of that house as well, and on to the next. This time, not a certificate, but a cowboy hat. Little Georgie, he always wanted to be a cowboy; to leave the suburbs and move to the wild west. I run out and move to the next. A space suit. Tommy always wanted to go to space. Dreams, dreams, dreams, nothing but dreams, and all of these dreams, now reality. That is why nobody is here. But, why am I here? Have my dreams not come true? What ever happened to my dreams of becoming an actress, of being a performer on Broadway? How I'd always told myself, I will pursue this dream, and I will not die until I've reached it. The lust for achievement that had always ran through my veins, my very blood. I'd always said, if anyone here is to achieve the unimaginable, it would be me! And yet, here I am, standing all alone in this abandoned neighborhood, running through the empty sidewalks, trying to find the reason for my being here, and worst of all, my being here alone.

I run back to my house, where I began, and sit on the porch again, rocking back and forth. I, who am still full of ideas, full of dreams that never came true, stuck in this- this wasteland of broken dreams. Destiny, laughing at me like a joke. Laughing at my dreams, laughing at reality. Perhaps, if I sit here and dream away, dream back into reality, I'll go back to where I came from. I'll get away from this nightmare, this horror. This mere existence of myself without a name to display to humanity, without a cause to stand up for. But before I know it, I am disappearing, slowly disappearing on these steps. Wait! I call aloud. Wait! I am not ready yet! There is so much I need to do! So much I need to show! To learn and to examine and to create! This can't be true. This won't be true. I can't let it be true. And please, take this from me, do not let this be true for you.