Tin cans

Most of the time, me and my cousins want to go barefoot and kick tin cans through the streets...

We volunteered to be street kids, growing up on oreo cookies and river water, swatting bugs off our faces.
At nine, we held our first guns and shot at walls in an abandoned hospital. One ricocheted and hit my cousin in the shoulder. We never held a gun again after that. Knives seemed safer anyways.
Fed a steady stream of folk tales and faerie horror stories, we spent most of our nights hunting monsters through desolate streets. During the day, we fought another kind of monsters...
School got in the way of living. School was a factory of monsters. It disabled our breathing, enabled our nerves, caused tears to stream down our cheeks. We were illiterate bastards without a wheel to change or adapt.
Eventually, our parents caught on. They put rules and stories between us. Boring stories. Distanced us like railway tracks. Made us isolated cases of withdrawal symptoms. Rules were implemented on us, on me...it made me wish I still had bottles of acid in my cabinets.
We grew. They grew up. I grew up. Laughed and cried. Forgot and replaced. We became I. And I was made to campaign against aids, cigarettes, drugs, sex, violence...
We wore ribbons in our hair, ties around our neck. We cheered in games, did our homework, stained our fingers with ink.
Our hearts were opened and broken. We helped people who didn't need help.
We were mainstream puppets until we met in a street corner market once more, for a bag of oreo cookies, at the age of twenty.

Me and my cousins took off our shoes and kicked a tin can through the streets, feeling the ghost of knives press against our thighs.