Elm St.
It’s only two streets away, but it feels like a totally different world. Elm St. Overgrown vegetation, no houses or people, no noise at all, just silence. Silence and the occasional car speeding by, almost dangerously close to where you’re walking, but not really - not close enough for you to worry about it, in any case. There’s mystery in the air here. To your left there’s a chainlink fence, sagging from years of neglect, blocking off a steep slope that leads to the parking lot.
It’s giant, this parking lot, just huge and abandoned. The pavement is cracked, with grass and bushes and trees growing out of it. What is this place? You see the train go by, in the distance, on the other side of the lot. The cold bites at you. It’s not quite spring yet, but it’s still green on Elm St. It’s always green on Elm St., except when it’s not.
You look down at the parking lot, consider going through a hole in the fence, being careful, trying not to slide down, going to explore, to find out what it is, and more importantly what it was, but you don’t - you never do, and you’re not sure why. Maybe you’re afraid of a car going by, maybe you’re afraid of getting caught, getting arrested, or maybe you’re just afraid that whatever you’d find down there wouldn’t be nearly as impressive as what your imagination comes up with.
At one point, on the side of the road, there’s something like a driveway, for cars, you guess, what used to be a way into the lot but is now covered in broken glass. There are two giant, concrete cubes here - barricades, maybe, though you use them as chairs - and a gate. A gate into the lot. It doesn’t open, though you can’t remember why - is it rusted? is it padlocked? It doesn’t matter. There’s a rusted up turnstile next to the gate that doesn’t turn anymore. There’s nothing for you here.
Back on Elm St., then, the actual street. To your right - trees. It looks like a forest, it looks like it goes on forever, but you know it doesn’t - it’s shallow. There’s a staircase through these trees, almost like a bridge across the ocean, but it too is gated, and the one thing you won’t do on Elm St. is bypass these gates. Someone put them here for a reason, and though you don’t know what that reason is, it’s hard to ignore them.
It took you a long time to put all the puzzle pieces together - this parking lot connects to this one, which has the tower in it, and the staircase, which leads to Elm St., which leads to the big lot, which is next to the train tracks, which eventually loop around and cross over Elm St. itself. There’s a mental map in your head of Elm St. and its surroundings, and there are several ways to get to wherever you want to go. That makes it sound more complicated than it is, of course, but it was so mysterious, so foreboding, when you first came here. You’re proud of yourself for solving some of its puzzles, even though you know you’ll never get them all.
Past the trees is the cell phone tower, blue and tall and powerful, rising into the air. You can’t see it from your house and you can barely see it from Elm St. proper, for some reason, a trick of perspective, maybe, but when you’re standing there looking at it, craning your neck to see all the way up, it’s incredible. You imagine climbing it sometimes - it’d be easy to get over the fence that stands between you and the tower, easy to grab the rungs, easy to climb up, but you don’t ever do that, and you never actually would.
The tower is in the dead center of the smaller parking lot, which is actually two parking lots with a barrier between them. The barrier isn’t even knee high, so it’s easy to climb over it, or even walk around it, so you do, a lot, because obviously this particular barrier isn’t meant to stop you. It’s meant for the cars. The pavement here is either faded and cracked or dark and broken, depending on which side of the barrier you’re on.
One side is much older, much more decrepit than the other, the one deeper in and further from the road. There are yards and yards without any actual parking lot, all vegetation - soon there will be more plants than pavement here. You’re drawn to the end of the lot, walking past the tower as you go and craning your neck again, thinking one more time about climbing it, but you continue on, to a little alcove in the trees where the pavement ends. To your right and way above you, there are houses, but you don’t care if they see you - this is your place, your place to think and breathe and live, and they don’t have any right to take that away from you. You stand there and look around. You breathe in the crisp air. The plants here are purple and green but mostly purple, and sharp, too, thorny plants that you don’t want to touch. There’s a paint can on the ground, somehow suspended at an angle, with one end on the ground and one end off. You look at it. It’s rusted to the ground like that. How long has it been here? How did it get stuck like that? You go to kick it, but don’t, and leave it there instead, for someone else to find.
One day you found a couch there, on Elm St., a red couch, wet from the dew and the rain, and dirty, too, but functional. The cushions were strewn all around everywhere. If you found it now you might’ve wondered about fleas or bedbugs or other such infestations, but back then you were more innocent, and that didn’t cross your mind. You thought about sitting down, and then you didn’t. Maybe you should have. It was colder, then, but it’s cold again now.
