Kenosha Kicking
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The sky was open then. We stared up at our stuffed animals, our avatars, as they rose into the air where we flung them. Hers was a sad-faced donkey, my own a chubby elephant. They seemed to rise higher than the buildings around us, farther than we could imagine to reach or leap or fly. They hung there for hours in the stillness of pure joy, as if in slow motion, as if falling through molasses toward our outstretched arms.
(Our parents had purchased the two dolls for us at the Goodwill, and it was immediately outside the door where we appreciated their power to defy gravity)
Later we were deposited into the heavy, porcelain bathtub, white with its decorated feet. There in shallow water splashing and bubbles piled above our noses we swam or sank into a sea of our own progenesis; fitting us and our Innocence. In our curiosities we crawled, our clean bodies careful to catch the details beneath the bed and above it. Out footprints were damp on walls and we ran in laughter from one room to the next.
Our nakedness a freedom and a force; we ran down halls, down staircases shouting! smiling! Our silliness a virtue, our smooth movement up and down and down and up stairs a dance. A circle and a scream! and a snicker into a blur. That was Celeste and I, two toddlers who couldn't have dreamed what destiny had put together for us thirteen years later.
Beautiful youth! Sans vanity, sans greed. All we wanted was to run, to enjoy, to see the world's colors as day-glow. Infinite varieties of happiness in the tiny, compressed antagonisms that we have grown to endure. Now, where is that abandon? That invisible world of the imagination? Its ghost haunting long hours, laborious days, lagging weeks of lingering months with bills to pay.