Cooperative Living October 2019 - 33

A Kingdom of Our Own
When my best friend and I met in
third grade, we never imagined that our
houses were by any means " connected. "
It was a scorching summer day when we
discovered that both of our backyards
bordered the same large expanse of
wooded and swampy land that we
dubbed " The Woods. " The two of us
spent years exploring the vast area,
conquering places and naming them, as
we built a kingdom of our own. Here,
our woodland adventures are divided
into three tales.
A Tale of Two Swords
The Woods was our escape from our
everyday, mundane lives. It was a world
for our controlling, for our creating.
Toward my friend's end of The Woods,
thick, green stocks of bamboo towered
above our heads in The Bamboo Forest.
We felled one and sliced it into halves -
the Two Swords - and carved them
into smooth sticks. Thus, our adventures
were ready to begin, and all had been
prepared. For the rest of the summer,
we island-hopped on my end of The
Woods, in the Dagobah System, named
after the swamp planet from Star Wars.
We used long-fallen trees as bridges
when our boots weren't tall enough to
wade through the water. We claimed
islands for ourselves, giving them
pretentious names and decorating them
with what could be found scattered in
our lands. We'd shout back and forth to
one another from our islands, waving
by Matthew Mehfoud
our swords high in the air. " Should we
go on? " we'd debate, and of course we
would, for only after our boots were
soaked and caked in mud would we
ever consider stopping. It always
seemed like there were more things to
discover, both in The Woods and
between the two of us.
A Tale of Two Thrones
We had islands in Dagobah and small
huts in The Bamboo Forest, but the
kingdom was still missing something. It
was a brisk, fall day when we uncovered
a reclusive, natural palace, one that lay
in the most protected area of The
Woods. It was guarded by the Thorn
Gates, a massive bush of briars, but if
carefully pulled apart by two people in
very precise places, it was passable.
After a short walk up a stream, we came
to a hill that ended in a precipice, where
slipping surely meant falling. But there
stood our palace, a giant tree, whose
thick roots - the Two Thrones -
jutted out of the side of the cliff, making
perfect nooks for sitting and climbing.
Over the years, my friend and I stored
away Mason jars and black planters that
had been discarded in The Woods. We
filled the jars and planters with yellow
wildflowers that grew in a field just
beyond the Thorn Gates. " What of our
heirs? " we'd wonder, but we both knew
that there would be no Princes or
Princesses of The Woods, for our reign
was to last forever.
A Tale of Two Kings
My friend and I were closer than
brothers and twice as thick as thieves;
there was never one without the other. By
the time winter hit and the temperatures
fell and the days were shorter, heart attacks
and cancer had struck our families. We
faced horrors very young in the real
world. We feared loss and uncertainty, but
in our world, in our kingdom, we were
fearless. There was only one place in The
Woods we could not claim to have
ventured: the other side of The Swamp.
With the season's first snowfall, The
Swamp had frozen solid, a thick sheet of
brown, opaque glass. " Do we dare? " we'd
query, for we both knew the path ahead
was treacherous. Ice cracked and sank
beneath our feet, we slipped and became
unbalanced, but neither let the other fall.
We pushed onward until Interstate 95 laid
before us and The Swamp behind us.
We - the Two Kings - were the first and
last to cross it, and in that moment, our
kingdom had finally reached completion.
Those long days spent in The Woods
were some of the happiest of my life.
The Woods was where our friendship
grew and flourished - Two Swords,
Two Thrones, Two Kings. And as the
two of us strived to survive and carve
out paths in the real world, it became
apparent that maybe the world was just
another kingdom ripe for our taking. So
long as we could create and imagine, we
would always have the power to shape
and mold the world around us. There
wasn't anything we couldn't accomplish
in The Woods, so neither would there
be anything that could stop us in the
real world. 
'I will forever view the world as a
kingdom of my own, always there for
whenever I am ready to shape it.'
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October 2019 | Cooperative Living | 31
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Cooperative Living October 2019

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