The Story of Five Seconds

Maybe you expect me to tell you a tragic story.

Maybe you expect a fantasy adventure

Where a kid and his best friend conquer villains

And meet beautiful and unique princesses.

That’s a story of an hour,

Or maybe only 23 minutes on YouTube.

No, I’m a very secluded person,

But I’m offering you five seconds.

Five seconds of my life.

The rest I’m keeping for myself.

The first second is a slideshow.

A picture of me as a child, wearing

A grin dripping with Neapolitan ice cream

In a waffle cone that I can barely hold

In a frame on a purple wall in my room

At a house I haven’t been in for years.

The second picture is me with a boy who is still

Very dear to me, and his father, and my mother.

He was almost my sibling, but it was not to be.

He was my first crush, my first kiss, and a glimpse-

A glimpse of a life that was from a fairy tale,

One where everyone is happy in the end.

The third and final picture (remember, this is

One second of slideshow) was my old room,

Messy, but full of life and stuff now caged in boxes.

If you were to see it in these five seconds,

It would be completely empty and bare.

The next three seconds were wasted

By a breath of the warm air that, at the time

Chilled me to the bone, and the mindless,

Worried chatter of my mom and her boyfriend.

The last second was me grabbing the handle

Of the truck’s door-The truck that would

Take me away from this place, this life.

See, it really is this simple.

A life can change forever in five seconds.

Author's Note

I wrote this in only a few minutes, but the idea had been in my mind for days. Can a life change forever in a matter of seconds? I think it can. What do you think?