Emily Smith Narrative

          Dirt Road

        Never did I think I would find this scene when I decided to venture down a dirt road along the countryside. I remember when I visited my aunt here when I was a child with my parents, that there was a town thirty miles down the dirt road. “The children who live there are unruly,’ my aunt used to say, “Those are not the kids who play by the rules or see success in their life, those are the kids who get in trouble with the law for the fun of it.” When I was a teenager, when I craved that rebellion all adolescents do, I wanted to travel down that dirt road and find out just how unruly the kids were.

         I could see the town in the distance. Less of town and more of a collection of dilapidated buildings that seemed to be begging to be rebuilt, to have some sort of support. There was a road that turned off the main drag that seemed to be calling out to me. Somewhere inside of me I could hear my sixteen-year-old self-begging for me to go down, it was as if I could taste the alcohol on my lips and smell the tobacco. 

         When I pulled up in front of that house, I saw her immediately. She was standing by the dirt road wearing a white dress with not a spec of dirt on her, blonde hair down, looking at what appeared to be her little brother jumping on a trampoline and with what I believed was her little sister beside her. It wasn’t her appearance that threw me off, it was the rolled up paper in her hand with tobacco in it. I was appalled on how an adolescent like her could, who couldn’t even be fourteen was smoking a cigarette so casually like it was nothing. She was killing herself, a “cancer stick” as my parents always told me. Yet something about her made me overwhelmed with jealousy, I wanted to be her when I was younger. I wanted to hang out with people like her, I wanted to be like her, yet she looked at me like she knew everything about me, like she was rubbing it in that I was never cut out for a life like hers.

         As I sat in my truck I thought for the first time just how little I had done with my life. To this day I had still never smoked a cigarette and I felt like I was an utter hypocrite, wanting to be wild and rebellious, but forever in the world of rule followers, whose parents wanted them to grow up and hold a steady job but never adventure down the dirt road.

         Snapping a picture of her, I found myself starting to press on the accelerator again, I couldn’t look at her anymore, I couldn’t be around her anymore. So I gave her one more final look, I felt her eyes gaze over me as if all of my secrets were spilling out, and I continued down the dirt road.