Spaceboy

I like to remember my childhood memories. Some of them are still around. I used to live in Alaska.

On the beach, we had only a little bit of sand. It was mostly giant boulders and torn up logs. I was young, everything was enormous, yet it seemed so normal to me. The rocks and I had the same objectives. They were castles, I was the astronaut. The sticks were my laser guns, and the logs were the bridges between space and time. I'd run over the huge stones and crouch on top, surveying the ocean. Life was an island, and on that island was my imagination. And even on such a small island as the one I called home, there was more.

J--'s Island, they called it. It was a small place, only about half a mile wide and long. Trees brimmed over the edges so that it seemed they'd fall off into the water. But it wasn't deep around one edge, the one that went back to the beach. My six year old body could wade from one island to the other. It was my island, my home away from home. If I'd ever been taken with a need to run from home, why, I knew just where I'd go. The trees and the rocks and the logs and the bushes.

I was always searching. It seemed there was something else in the forests. I'd climb through the underbrush and find passageways in the bushes, places to hide. From what? From my parents? From my friends? Or maybe just from myself. I was nowhere, no one could find me. And I was young enough to convince myself I was the only one left on Earth.