Weekly Writing – July 20 2024

Acknowledging that the world was ordinary was part of growing up. Accepting that it was ordinary felt more like part of dying. So he never had – he kept taking his camera out to fields where farmers had supposedly seen strange things, unnatural stilt figures at midnight, and when his friends asked, he told them he was stargazing. The acknowledgement was the important thing, after all – the out-loud declaration. As long as he said the right things, he could still take weekend trips to walk through supposedly haunted houses and tell his friends he had been hiking.
That just felt like part of living. Lying – maybe that was the real rite of passage. Maybe none of them ever really accepted that the nights were empty, and just said whatever it took to avoid scorn for that. Maybe his other dream, aside from seeing something unordinary in a field, would come true someday, and he would find one of his friends out there with a camera at midnight. If so, he would smile at them like sharing an unspoken secret and ask whether they were enjoying the stars.