An hour and a half drive
20 bottles of beer, a picnic basket already half empty and six friends.
Laughter and music anticipation for what is to come overpowering the silence of one boy
One boy in the back, cradling a beer as he rocked in his seat, looking out the window
He was there but his mind was elsewhere
And no one else noticed.
An hour and a half to a place they all knew
through a forest as still and quiet as a child's room deep in the night
But for him, the forest was bursting with life.
Arriving at their destination, through the silent woods and over rolling hills covered with corn that seemed to go on forever.
An hour and a half to a beach at the river on the other side of their world
But his world was endless and beautiful, and sometimes he was surrounded by life but sometimes it was just him and the beer bottle in his hand that grounded him to reality and yet remained the only thing with which he shared his thoughts.
They arrived at the river, seeming to flow steadily and quietly forever, but to him it was the sea
To him this river lead everywhere and nowhere
It was the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen.
They asked him if he was having fun, the five friends he had come with, he replied yes, he always did.
They had been coming here for a year, as often as they could, all of them loved it but he nothing could understand the beauty he saw in it, nothing except the beer bottle, chilling his fingers that were tanned from hours in the sun and callused from the strings of an old guitar he played when he was alone.
Around him his friends laughed and played, they splashed in the water and ate there food and drank the 19 bottles of beer but those bottles were not important to him.
It was just this one bottle, the one that he was holding surface smooth against worn fingers, cold in the heat of a summer afternoon and whispering endless possibilities into his ears.
But every time he was drawn back to reality by something or someone that reminds him that his possibilities are not endless, but this bottle, it's possibilities are endless, so he threw it
He threw it into their river
He threw it into his sea.