It was then that I decided to tear this town apart. There were people living boring lives and boys and girls who couldn’t see over the edge of the interstate highway that divided the town in two. It needed to be done and I was the fool to do it. I was Don Quixote, there to save the girl from dying before she lived.
And what life was still in this town that God himself had forgotten! Bright eyed dreamers resigned to machine parts and weld their caskets shut. Cute girls with long black hair and their smiling band-shirted boyfriends clung close in the backyards of their parents’ houses, unaware of the bustling world that awaited. They had never learned to dance and drink and yell at the moon.
So for the first time since I stood in front of 12-year-olds and preached about the stars, I put down my book and grabbed someone by the shirt collar and pointed at the sky.
“Look up, scream at the darkness, and pretend just for a second that you want to be remembered,” I said to a girl with a broad smile and eyes that went for decades. “Come with me and do wonderful things. We’re far too young and beautiful to live like this.”
