Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable...they would live forever and ever.
This is the fairytale of my life, the mythology of my existence, and, as I only have one story to tell, there is only one way to tell it. You may find it a little melodramatic at moments and you may not like who I was at times. But, princes frequently start out as frogs and, perhaps, by the time I reach my end, you will understand why. And so, as we all must have a beginning, a middle and an end, I will start at the beginning. Once upon a time...
The Vagabond King: A coming of age story
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This is the fairytale of my life, the mythology of my existence, and, as I only have one story to tell, there is only one way to tell it. You may find it a little melodramatic at moments and you may not like who I was at times. But, princes frequently start out as frogs and, perhaps, by the time I reach my end, you will understand why. And so, as we all must have a beginning, a middle and an end, I will start at the beginning. Once upon a time...
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This city is yawning before me, but I'm not tired.
We screamed this primeval scream built on a base of freedom, raised from beauty of a dying breed, and threw our heads back to laugh or cry, I'm not entirely sure which. But the scream shook the golden sunset, bringing it to its knees.
When I grow up, maybe I will bethe first one to circle the sea.Or maybe I will just spend all my daydoing everything my way.Maybe I will be in a world of my ownI just hope not alone.I just know that whatever I doI will never, ever forget about you.
Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.
I'm not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I'm old, perhaps.