Ultimate Trinket Adventure Book

The magical floating island

Waiting, is something I hate. I have only gained the skill of patience from years of forced and coerced practice. It is forced on me by the internal compulsion to be pathologically early. Like the first year of high school, It started at seven-thirty but my mom dropped me off at something close to six on her way to work. I sat outside the main entrance and waited until they opened the building. Then I waited for class to start. I would rather be there nearly two hours early than chance getting there late because I missed the bus. I am still terrified of what could happen if I am even a few minutes late. For school I was never tardy, I was either there early or not at all. I stayed home sick a lot. I had medical issues and mental health issues exacerbated by bullying.

I waited alone a lot; not just for school,or my mother to come home from work, for my life to make sense. In the picture it looks like the little boy has waited a lot too. I wonder if he is waiting for his grandfather to pick him up. I can see him having been dropped off by the train. Maybe his mother and father have hit hard times and they had no choice but to send him to go live with relatives in the country.

Maybe the boy is running away from home. He is waiting to hop on a train with his teddy bear and loyal dog and a suitcase filled with toys. He doesn’t realize that the train doesn’t stop there, and even if it did he doesn’t have a chance of getting on without a ticket. At some point soon his father will be pulling up in the family station wagon to pick him up and take him home. He was running away because his mother and father told him he was getting a new baby brother. He felt like they were replacing him.

Maybe the boy is waiting for a train to a magical realm where he will discover he is their long lost prince. His royal parents have searched for him for years. Ever since a wizard stole him away to protect him from a magical prophesy that an evil warlock would find him and kill him before his seventh birthday. The warlock had come and the wizard had died protecting him, now he had to return to the magical realm on his own with nothing more than a talking dog and a magical teddy bear for company.

Being alone, without friends is how I spent so much of my childhood. I didn’t fit in well. I was too short, too smart, too fat and too weird to find anyone like me. When I did, I jealously clung to my friends. It didn’t help me fit in that I had feelings for the other girls that weren’t exactly acceptable to my vigorously christian father. The first best friend I remember was a girl who lived down the street. We played together. We were in the same class. We were inseparable, until her parents decided to move her across the country. I felt so alone. She left when we were in second grade. It wasn’t until middle school that I found another person I felt safe being open with. Well mostly open, I never told her that I more than liked her. She was smart, pretty and a social outcast like me. I think she was my first real crush. But I never told anyone, I kept it a secret for the longest time, even from myself. It was a relationship that never would have gotten far. When we spent too much time together we invariably argued with each other.

After we fell apart, or grew apart I was alone and waiting again. I waited for the man I thought I was supposed to marry. I had dreamed up some pretty specific qualities he would have. He would be a junior, like me. He would have a last name that would start with H, so my initials wouldn’t change. He would be one year older than me. He would be about four inches taller than me, the perfect height. I was twenty when I met him to my surprise. He had every quality on my list. He was the perfect man. We even talked marriage. Then I kissed him, it felt like I was kissing a brother. When I kissed my dog on the forehead it meant more to me. He was everything I asked for and completely wrong for me. So I waited some more. Then I met my wife she was better than anything I could have planned and she is one of the few things in my life that has really been worth waiting for.

810 words

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