The Wishing Well in ChinaTown

I like to think I'm a peculiar type of person. I've come to realise that I lived life a bit differently from other people and a lot of that involves not truly living life at all for a very long time. 

My memories therefore are very significant to me. We went to ChinaTown a lot growing up. My grandparents came to visit every summer or winter whenever they could when I was very young. I remember I loved them. I loved them a lot back then. We'd always take them to ChinaTown and we'd have huge servings of Chinese food on a spinning table at a restaurant near the Wishing Well. We bought two turtles there one time for a few dollars and had those turtles for most of my life. They were little when we bought them. I was little. 

I always remember going to the Wishing Well and asking for some change to throw. There were usually a lot of people crowding the well and there were lively turtles swimming in the water, koi fish too. There's certain words at different spots in the well and you'd try to toss your coins at the words that you were wishing for. I remember I always through my coins for money. 

It's funny the things we wish for when we're young. Things. More stuff. 

My job brings me to a lot of places I visited when I was young. It brings me to a lot of places I saw people visit in movies or read about visiting in books. Today my job brought me back to ChinaTown in the early morning with no tourists and no crowds. It must have been almost ten years since I'd been back. I knew the area still but only faintly and right where I needed to be stood the old wishing well. It was surrounded by the ancient arcade rides that had been there when I was young but it was dark. The water was murky, there weren't any coins in the well and no one was around.

I saw the words I used to wish for, the memory of all the coins I'd wasted came back to me. It's funny that my same two feet stood on that same old ground but instead of wishing for more stuff, I thought about all those memories. When you're young you really don't realise how much value is in things that are priceless.

Priceless thoughts.