Week 33:A Brighter Day

By Colin Doherty
Champlain Valley Union High School, Grade 11

I am waiting for the sun to rise. We are sitting on top of the car, Max and Liz and me. We got this crazy idea a few years back that someday we would go driving, out, somewhere else. We said we'd do it together. And now we're out here in Death Valley, in the Eureka Dunes, watching the sun rise. We'd been thinking about this trip for so long that finally we just got in my car and went. We drove west. We didn't have any place else to go. Sometimes, you just get tired of staring at the same things all your life, you know? The same old buildings, the same old trees, the same dirt roads and churches and everything.
Sure, things change over time. You get the forest of trees replace by an equally dense forest of identical houses and the dirt roads paved over into interstate highways. You get your churches torn down and replaced by shopping centers. Maybe that's worse than everything staying the same, that's what I was telling Max. He wasn't listening very hard; he's none too philosophical. He prefers his tools and his engines and his hands. I can't fault him, sometimes I get tied up in ideas.
I dragged out a water jug and drank deep. I passed it to Liz, knowing she wanted it. Before she ever asks me something, it's there in her eyes, like an open book. Perhaps this is why I'm friends with these two, because they are both simple where I am tied in knots, worried about the real when I'm ignoring it. Perhaps opposites do attract, I was telling them. I was thinking out loud again.
Max interrupted. He told me it was almost time. Suddenly we could see the sun's first rays coming over the hill, and Liz said "That’s the brightest shade of yellow I’ve ever seen!" For a few minutes we couldn't even talk, we were too busy watching. And then we were talking again, and I was telling them I loved them, that's what I said under that desert sun, and we said we'd never be apart again, us three.