La vida misma♥

[...]In the dreams he will have in later years, he is always leaving Derry alone, at sunset. The town is deserted; everyone has left. The theological seminary and the victorian houses on West Broadway brood black against a lurid sky, every sunset you ever saw rolled up into one.

He can hear his footfalls echoing back as they rap along the concrete.The only other sound is water rushing hollowly through the stormdrains and he sees all those places again, intact as they were then: the hulking brick fort of Derry elementary, the kissing bridge with its complex intalgio of initials, highschool sweetheatrs ready to crack the worls open with their passion who had grown up to become insurance agents and car salesmen and waitresses and beauticians; he sees the statue of Paul Bunyan against that bleeding sunset sky and the leaning white fence which ran along the Kansas Street sidewalk at the edge of the Barrens. He sees them as they were, as they always will be in some part of his mind... and his heart breaks with love and horror.

Leaving, leaving Derry, he thinks. We are leaving Derry, and if this was a story it would be the last half-dozen pages or so; get ready to put this one up on the shelf and forget it.

The sun is going down and there's no suond but my footfalls and the water in the drains. This is the time of leaving.

So, you leave, and there is an urge to look back, to look back just once as the sunset fades, to see that severe new englad skyline one final time - The spires, the standpipe, Paul with his axe slung over his shoulder. But it is perhaps not such a good idea to look back - all the stories say so.

Look what happened to Lot's wife. Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious questions.

You leave and you leave quick when the sun starts to go down, he thinks in this dream. That's what you do...and if you spare a last thought, maybe it's ghosts you wonder about...the ghosts of children standing in the water at sunset, standing in a circle, standing with their hands joined together, their faces young, sure, but tough...tough enough, anyway, to give birth to the peolple they will become, tough enough to understand, maybe, that the people they will become must necessarily birth the peolple they were before they can get on with trying to understand simple mortality. The circle closes, the wheel rolls, and that's all there is.

You don't have to look back to see those children. Part of your mind will see them forever, live with them forever, love with them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were one the repository of all you coul become.

Children, I love you. I love you so much.

So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away, drive away from Derry, from memory...but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night.

Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little Rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.

All the rest is darkness.

He awakens from this dream unable to remember exactly what it was, or much at all beyond the simple fact that he has dreamed about being a child again. He touches his wife's smooth back as she sleeps her warm sleep and dreams her own dreams; he thinks that it is good to be a child, but it is also good to be grownup and able to consider the mistery of childhood...

It's beliefs and desires. I will write about all of this one day, he thinks, and knows it's just a dawn thought, an after dreaming thought. But it's nice to think so for a while in the morning's dream silence, to think that childhood has it's own sweet secrets and confirms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love.

To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes it's own imitation of inmortality: a wheel.

Or so, Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings ofter dreaming, whem he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it. [...]

-You can't be careful on a skateboard, man.

(jeez)

-Beep-Beep, Richie.