Sammy - Blog Posts
day 14: favourite TV show stranger things
day 12: a song lyric "fight off the light"
day four: flowers
Another day, another school, where the kids all have different names but are all the same. The teacher, also different and also the same, asks her class if anyone collects things. Sam frowns. If he was old enough to know better, he’d say he collects sorrows.
Kids raise their hands and talk excitedly about stamps, flowers drying between book pages, dead butterflies pinned like trophies in transparent showcases, Yo-Yos. Sam raises tentatively his hand, because he wants to melt in this classroom, wants to be just a name, to have a bedroom, a favorite crosswalk, and the luxury to collect things. So he says the one and only thing he can think of: “motel rooms”. Because this is true, somehow. An eclectic collection of dusk in nowhere towns and first days everywhere.
She tries to explain to him that it isn’t the same, because Sam can’t carry motel rooms with him, doesn’t even own them. She sees the light dim in his eyes, as kids start to giggle around him, glancing at him like he just said something hilarious. There’s nothing funny about this. She asks him if there is anything else that he keeps somewhere safe, anything that makes him happy and that he carries with him everywhere, that he can’t get enough of, and Sam thinks about it long and hard, makes a list of everything that fits the description.
In the end there is just one thing, but the moment he thinks it, Sam’s heart swells in his chest and the kids’ mocking gazes fade in the classroom’s background, because his collection is the coolest in the entire goddamn universe. And none of the kids here can claim to have something as great as him. They can keep their lifeless butterfly wings.
“Sammys, I collect Sammys”, he says with a big grin, and she ask “What are Sammys?” but Sam just laughs. No one in this school deserves to know. No one in the entire town deserves to see his collection. So Sam just laughs and when the bell rings, he leaves with his bag on his shoulders and his teacher’s eyes on his back.
She’s walking to her car, thinking about dinner and going for a jog maybe, when she hears a loud and boisterous “Sammy!” behind her. There’s so much unfiltered joy and love in those five letters that she feels a half second of jealousy before she can stop herself. She looks around and sees a boy, sun bleached hair and vibrant green eyes, who must be 8 at most, waving at little Sam who is running toward him at full speed, a private smile she’s almost ashamed to be a witness of spreading on his cheeks.
That’s when she gets it, and as she watches Sam throw himself at the other boy, who just laughs and hugs Sam just as hard, she hopes Sam’s collection will never end collecting dust on the shelves of his memories.
More Sammy doodles from the previous week, yay!
Always Keep Fighting -Jared Padalecki *I tried.