Misty Memories

I remember this.  There was this one spot, that was my favorite.  It looked as much like the preserve as my twelve year old imagination could conjure up.  I'd sit for hours in the quiet woods, trying to see past every sunlit leaf, every wavering bough, for a glimpse of a jacket sleeve; strain my ears to fight back sound of the wind that might every second be covering up the whisper of a footstep; scour the ground for any dropped trinket, harvested and collected every mysterious scrap of paper that harbored any thread of a connection, any tangible proof of any kind.  I never ever found anything.  Not a footprint, not a scrap of metal, not a bit of unraveled yarn, not even a deer. Even the unicycle I thought I'd found in the lake bed turned out to be just an ordinary old bicycle.  Twenty years of searching later, and I still possess no shred of evidence to prove their non-existence.  Twenty years of searching later, and the only treasure I've found to keep, is the nameless belief I've had all along: that reality and tangibility are not synonyms.