Coney Island

         As I sit on this carousel ride, without any music or lights, a feeling of comfort comes over me. For the first time in years, I feel home again. I rest my head against a plastic horse with wings and close my eyes. For a second, the smell of funnel cake and hot dogs seem real. That’s what I love about imagination; how real it can make things feel. Despite that it has been years since I’ve been here, being here now makes those memories feel as if they happened just yesterday.

         I grew up in Brooklyn, living in a brownstone with my little brother and my father. My mother died giving birth to my brother Randy when I was three. I was so young when she passed that I don’t remember her and I’ve wished everyday for just one memory, but all I have is a picture. Despite the loss of my mother, my childhood and family life were pretty good. My father was the best dad anyone could ever ask for. He was always there for Randy and I, making sure we were very well taken care of.
         The packaging company where my father worked closed down when I was nine. My father spent the first few months searching for a new job, but had no luck. He came home from a job search one day as Randy and I were playing on the steps and sat between us. I had never seen my father so distraught before. He sat silent, with one arm around Randy and the other around me.
{indent{When you’re nine years old, three minutes of silence feels like a lifetime, but our father was silent so we were too. After a long pause, he told us that he was having trouble finding a job and that he thought it would be best for us to move to California to live with our Grandma. Our grandma lived in Manhattan Beach, California but as kids we thought it was the same as Manhattan, New York so Randy asked if we could take grandma to Coney Island every weekend. My father sat trying to explain the difference to us for a while and it seemed to only make him more upset. He didn’t want to move us away from Brooklyn, where my mother was buried and we had grown up until that moment, but he had to do what was best for us.
         My father took us to Coney Island for that last time that evening and the next day we packed up and moved to California. Randy and I spent all the time we could at Coney Island growing up. We would spend a whole weeks allowance in one day there and still go back the next day just to watch the people ride the Cyclone. We ate hot dogs for dinner almost five nights a week during the summers and Randy almost always had cotton candy stuck somewhere on him. We would make our dad walk the beach for hours just so we wouldn’t have to go home. Even though Coney Island was only a part of our lives during the summer, it’s what made some of our fondest childhood memories and what we grew to miss most of our time living in Brooklyn. 

         Eighteen years later I decided to make this trip back to Brooklyn, to bring my mother flowers. Part of the reason Randy and I loved Coney Island so much is because our mother loved it too. My father started bringing us there the summer after she passed away, even though we were still babies, because he used to go with her all the time. Coney Island was as close as I would ever get to having a memory of mother.
         Sitting here, feeling the cool breeze of the Atlantic, I notice how different yet the same things are since I’d last been here. Nothing’s quite in tip top shape but it still feels the same. I can here the roller coaster screams from summers past in my mind as look at an old tattered picture of my mother. Everything is closed at Coney Island as I sit on this carousel thinking of my mother, and I cannot help from smiling.


Note: I suppose this is fanfiction in a sense. There is a song by Death Cab For Cutie called Coney Island that inspired me and lead me to writing this.