The Body

by Stephen King

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.

Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?

I went because of the shadows that are always somewhere behind our eyes, because of what Bruce Springsteen calls the darkness on the edge of town in one of his songs, and at one time or another I think everyone wants to dare that darkness in spite of the jalopy bodies that some joker of a God gave us human beings.

There’s something horrible and fascinating about the way dark comes to the woods, its coming unsoftened by headlights or streetlights or houselights or neon. It comes with no mothers’ voices, calling for their kids to leave off and come on in now, to herald it.

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.

What I did tell him was: “I was thinking of something else, that’s all.” The most important things are the hardest things to say.

I am feeling the most like the pre-adolescent Gordon Lachance that once strode the earth, walking and talking and occasionally crawling on his belly like a reptile. That boy was me, I think. And the thought which follows, chilling me like a dash of cold water, is: Which boy do you mean?

The trestle upstream is gone, but the river is still around. So am I.