The End

December 18th was the day, I won’t forget that day anytime soon, everyone was getting ready for Christmas, but my cousin and I were getting ready for some deep work. We started out the day as normal, eating our chocolate cereal, taking a shower, and going out on a short bicycle ride. When we came back from the ride, we just sat down on the same leather couch we had been on the day before where we found our answer, now; we were determined to find the way to make that answer the real one, the only one. As we stood up from the couch, and started walking away my mom saw us and asked “where are you guys going?” to which my cousin replied “to smash some mailboxes” my mom only laughed and sent us off, right when we were leaving the house she screamed “be sure to be back by seven, seven thirty at the most”. We set off, my watch marking two and forty-eight pm. We walked past the driveway, into the sidewalk and kept on going on it. Our decision was to first go and see a kids’ movie at the local theater, which was just a couple of blocks away. We walked past the entrance to the neighborhood.

In a matter of maybe ten minutes we would be making a line to the theater, we decided to watch “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” because we felt like even though it was meant for kids, it still had something in it for teens, neither of us had watched the movie, so we really didn’t know what to expect, even though we had a general idea about it. Thanks to the movie we found out a lot about the answer, while we obviously aren’t kids, we still enjoyed the movie. The kids in the theater all loved the movie; we could hear them as we were walking out of the theater with comments like: “wow mom, that was the best movie ever”, “cooooooool”, and “I loved the part where…” although we didn’t think the movie was all that special, even though we both love C.S. Lewis and his Narnia series, we still hadn’t found our “inner kid”, or “inner teen” we were pretty much stuck. We had lost two hours and we still didn’t have a clue on what to do next.

One of the kids was tugging at his mom’s shirt, asking her to let him go to some kid named Jimmy, apparently every one of his friends was going to the party. The mom kept refusing and made him get into the car, the kid was clearly very angry at his mother, and just sat in the back with a frown in his face and his arms crossed. We just kept watching as the car left, and I thought aloud “were we ever that way?” my cousin just replied with a quick nod, and went to tell how we would always do that and that most of the times we got our way. I then asked her “will gaining our inner kid really be that useful? I mean, it’s not like we were superman back then” she replied with a comment that just made my question seem dumb, she said “yeah, but we really did feel like we were superman, that we could do anything, and that the world was our playground”. This put a whole new meaning to our day, we were really trying to find the freedom and imagination we had as a kid, not an “inner kid”. We had finally found our answer; it had taken way shorter than we had expected it to. We were deeply satisfied, the kind of satisfaction which only comes when you finally get something out of your head that you have been thinking a long time about. We headed home and got there at around five o’ clock. We just turned the PS3 on and played all day long, having to finally be able to rest and not have a care in the world. That is what we all have lost, and what we all have to find.

The Answer

               Asking my cousin about my idea of freeing myself I knew that her idea was totally different from mine. Sitting on her bed in utter darkness feeling the soft linen on my legs, a realization dawns on me, what if my "deep thought" was only something that occurred to me in one of my existential phase outs. My cousin began demonstrating how that even though we had lost our “inner kid”, we would never lose our "inner self". I thought long about what she said, just as I thought, our ideas were totally different. As I started telling her that our inner kid was not lost, she put a "we're on different wavelengths" face. I ignored it and kept on going. My point was that the inner kid was only taking a rest, and that we have to wake it up, and once we do, after all that inactive time, it would have the energy of five kids. I know this sounds like something that would only occur to some stoned guy, but every now and then I have these thoughts, and they usually don't leave until I find some decent answer, or another question arises.

               We decided to go to sleep and try and figure this out tomorrow. I don’t know about my cousin, but at least I couldn’t fall asleep thinking about the question. I spent most of the night lying in my bed with a blank mind, trying to find an answer, but my mind decided to just stay blank, making me stay awake for nothing. I woke up in a feisty mood, only saying “good morning” to the people who were expecting me to say it. I had my usual breakfast, a couple of waffles with the sweet taste of maple syrup on top, my glass of milk, and my small bowl of fruit, which I had just begun to start eating at breakfast recently and I was still growing accustomed to. My cousin came out of her room in what appeared to be a better mood than me, but she didn’t order anything to eat, and just went past the kitchen to sit on the couch. She hasn’t been eating that much lately, so people didn’t really pay any attention to her not ordering anything. I slowly finished my meal and went to the same couch my cousin was in. We just sat there, turned the TV on, and just watched silently. The comedy show currently showing made us livelier, we had gone from serious to less happy in just a couple of minutes.

               I realized how something as simple as a TV show had completely altered our moods. I turned and was about to start the “question” conversation, when I thought that it might make us all serious again I stopped in my tracks and kept watching the TV. We had spent 2 hours watching the comedy show marathon; I then started to slowly introduce the conversation, talking about how I had a new theory to the question. I stated that maybe our “inner kid” had just not been how it usually was, just like us before the TV program, it could change so fast we didn’t even notice it. Maybe our “inner kid” had just grown up and had become an “inner teen”, this was what changed us and made our personalities change. She seemed to understand the answer I had given, and made an acknowledgement nod. We had finally reached a stalemate, and we knew that was our parting point to making our definite answer. This was not a problem we would leave unsolved, my cousin and I only had 2 more weeks together to make this question go away from our minds, it had been bugging us even though we only had started to think about it the day before.  We felt like these two weeks were a mission that had to be done, that the world depended on us. We started making plans so we had an orderly way to go about finding the answer. We finished watching TV, because the show was really funny, and it lifted our moods so we wanted to stay like that the most time we could.

The Question.

          As I walked past the glass door from the ice cream shop, with my overpriced chocolate chip vanilla ice cream in a waffle cone, I noticed how any thing around me can distract me from my surroundings. To my right I saw my cousin eating her lemon sherbet with chocolate shavings with delight in each bite; she was so focused on her treat that she didn’t see that I hadn’t taken a single bite out of my ice cream. While I may get distracted by an ice cream cone, it can also be something like the car keys hanging by my hand, or the small piece of wood in the middle of my lawn, or the squirrel climbing a tree. Pretty much everything is a distraction, and this 

makes it so that my day is focused on small useless things rather than the big picture happening all around me. 

         I took some time out of my cold dessert to take a closer look at the city I live in. It occurs to me that I hadn’t even taken the time to see the almost daily commute I did from my house to the ice cream shop. I just know that all I have to do is take a left turn, another left turn by the playground on my neighborhood, then after walking through the main street to the little house complex, I had to take a right, followed by a left and just straight down through the city park, and finally I reach the store. On my way back, I try to pay more attention to the path I take home, only occasionally taking a little bite of my ice cream cone. 

          Walking down the park, I see some kids rolling down the hill, they’re probably around six years old, and either siblings or close friends. In front of the hill were their parents, they were both talking on the phone, only stopping once to tell their kids to quiet down, and not giving any attention to their children who appear to be having the best day or their lives. In the lone pond on the middle of the park were some ducklings and their apparent mother. Cars just passed by some of them probably over the speed limit, missing how even the simplest of things can make your day better. Halfway through the park I asked my cousin if she wanted to sit on a bench and just relax a little. She had almost finished her ice cream and when she saw mine she asked, “wow, you haven’t eaten anything, you usually end it in a couple of bites.” She then noticed how I was in a deep state of thinking and asked if something was wrong. I started speaking about how we have come from being the little kids rolling down the hill, to teenagers who just follow a daily routine, and growing up to reinforce that way of life. As soon as I finished she had this “that was deep dude” look on her face. We both just sat there for a while, I eventually finished my ice cream. 

          As soon as it started getting dark I asked my cousin if she was ready to go, our parents would be worried sick and I didn’t like the idea of being only my cousin and me all alone in the middle of a not so bright park. We slowly walked home, yet we found ourselves at the front door in no time. As expected, as soon as we walked in the house our parents were there ready to scold us. We didn’t pay any attention to it and just left to our rooms and lay on our bed. We came out of our room only to grab something to eat and take a quick shower. I then walked across the aisle outside of my room to my cousin’s room to keep talking about our thoughts at the park. We came to the conclusion that the only way to see if it was really childhood which made us into the happiest of people or could we find a way to be the kids that could find the delight in about anything we came across.  To be continued…