Beneath the railroad tracks at the intersection of Highway 13 and county road 42 my heart is buried. In an old metal tackle box sit the remnants of a past I left behind, hoping to never look back at again.
Within sits a badge I wore on a blue uniform. Something I used to wear proudly. I was the last boyscout. I was going to make a difference. I didn’t know I was going to fend off attempts on my life, attempts on my safety. I didn’t know that I was going to witness a 17 year old scatter his brains with a 12 gauge across the wall of his mother’s apartment. I didn’t know I was going to watch over a crime scene with body parts from a wife and her 3 year old child. I didn’t know I was going to be cutting down people who had hung themselves in their garage, or pull their purple carcasses from their running automobiles.
Inside there is a cheap little diamond ring, not even half a carat, but it was all I could afford. I wanted to marry her so badly, and I was living on a freelance artist’s salary which could afford me captain crunch and ramen noodles in my cupboard. I skipped my rent payment for that ring. She wore it proudly for three weeks. Then, after a weekend with the girls she gave it back to me. Said she wanted to see other people. WAS seeing other people. Other people with higher salaries and lucrative careers. Other people who weren’t so emotional or sensitive.
There are scraps of paper with love poems written to her. Scribbled nonsense that I thought would make her heart sing. Poems that could be country songs had the right singer sung them. foolish chicken scratch on wasted time. None of which mattered to her or to me…anymore.
Pictures of loves past, faded and probably ruined from the damp of the earth. Each photo a memory that stabs like a rusty ice pick to the core of the heart.
Paintbrushes I used while going to art school. A dream career brought to an end by irrelevancy and redundancy.
Maybe that’s what sits in that tackle box, beneath the tracks of the intersection of Highway 13 and County Road 42….dreams….dreams that died. The box is probably gone now, pulled from the ground by railroad workers putting in new tracks. Perhaps they went through it laughing to themselves or perhaps they are wondering whatever happened to the melancholy kid who buried his memories beneath Minnesota gravel at the age of 24.
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