“I’m going nowhere. This is the good ship lifestyle.” — Chumbawumba
“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.” — T.S. Eliot
He quietly came into the bathroom, entered the stall, locked the latch, and sat on the toilet bowl with a sigh, placing his head in his hands. Never in his life had he felt this way, yet he felt the same every day. And the days passed.
Special as he was, Hugh could never understand his intellect. Classmates showed their fake awe in loud voices, then immediately returned to their individual experience. What else could being smart do for him except put him in a box until retirement? He had seen them in movies, but never actually believed that people actually spent their days thawing in cubicles. Or was it freezing? Hugh believed he thought too much. At events like eighth grade dances or sitting in youth group, he thought while others around him chuckled at jokes and showed their concerned eyes to each other. He thought, then thought about thinking and how he thought too much. Then he thought about thinking about thinking, and would try and keep track of the actual concept of the train of thought, pausing each step to admire the railroad tie.
This did not occupy his mind now, though; this mental chain was reserved for the social circle only. While he was alone, it was impossible for him to keep up. He would sometimes read for two hours in a paperback and only get through thirty pages. Sitting up, it felt like his mind had gone through a long tunnel and come out exhausted. That is why he would sit up at one at night, wondering why he couldn’t sleep, and kept thinking about sleep. Turning his mind at sleep seemed to brush it away from his list of physical capacities, and it never came to him.
Now he wasn’t at home. He was in a stall at school, taking the break he took every day, his daily bread. He was not handsome or horrid, ripe or reasonable, but full of regrets, vulgar plies that he knew shouldn’t pervade the sweet soup of life. And he laughed, laughed at the jokes about how Julie had acted drunk, or what Aaron and his cousin did in the back of his car. Julie and Aaron were both in a separate sphere, one higher than his, but still just another circle of this mental hell. If it was never up to him, that would be fine, but he felt guilty for some reason. His mind was an endless highway, leading to the west coast, knowing that there, awaiting his presence, was at least the fulfillment of one dream that wasn’t out of reach.
He glanced at the bars lining the stall, wondering for the hundredth time what they were for. Maybe, just maybe, to hold on to when going through hard times. Hugh smiled, because he could keep his mind, at least for the time being, off of the havoc thoughts of sex had wreaked on his mind. No more, he was above that. Never had he been kissed in his life, and never had he been truly in love. He imagined, believe it or not, kissing at the top of a Ferris wheel. Still a dream. He had read it in a book, and was envious of the boy for losing his oral virginity at age twelve. The only virginity Hugh ever lost came out of a small bottle of wine, which his parents knew nothing about and which he had only “tapped” once. He was constantly worrying about homework and school and friends, but it seemed as if no matter what he did the A’s kept coming and the girls kept leaving. Nowhere was a friend to him, and he was reckless in spite of himself.
“Don’t get bogged down in the footnotes.” — My English teacher
Hugh got out of the stall and stared at himself in the mirror. There was a mirror at his house, encrusted with stray toothpaste and the moisture that came upon it because of the burning showers Hugh was so apt to take. Not even after a long jog did he ever feel like taking a quick shower and going to sleep. Heck, he never slept well anyway. Standing in the shower, he once cursed God and blamed him for all the tragedies built up against him like an army against Horatio, except that he was nothing like Horatio and the minute the armies reached him, it would be done. Meanwhile, all he could think about in the times after that one fateful shower was that incident. Funny how one thought controlled his lifely bath.
He rinsed his hands in the ever-cold water of the industrial sink and used two paper towels to dry them again. In his mind, he imagined the journey the towels would take. First, being picked up by the janitor and the trash and tossed nonchalantly into the dumpsters behind school. Later on in the week, a truck would pull up and all the garbage would go nonchalantly into the compactor. Then it would be dumped with a mess load of other garbage in the town dump and would become indefinable from all the other waste. What an exciting life I lead, thought Hugh, as he strolled out and into the hall with pastel (cream colored? White?) walls, and across a floor that had endured the years' torture of tobacco stains and lugeys and trash. Was all the debris supposed to give it character? The dark stain on the floor covered Hugh’s heart with a momentary sigh, echoing the whispers of ages into which came a knight in shining armor.
How many days had he spent staring at the walls of this school. How many classes had he taken, when all he could think about was how there were a million other kids in the same boat as him. How could his life matter if there were so many other successful, well educated, angst filled teenagers out there taking the road less traveled, but still traveled. He believed the words of the prophets. Life was supposed to be unique, and if his life was not going to be unique in some way it was going to be a failure. This he was sure of. As a romantic, the American Dream had changed. Hugh had no idea what had become of it, whether it had gone off drunk into the alley with money that was surely not for beer, or whether it was on Skull Island in a treasure chest, known only by pirates and bullies. He was not rich, famous, good looking, or of the popular nature, but he did know he had never wronged someone, found it impossible to cheat on tests, and was always, always true to himself.
Hugh walked up the stairs but, instead of turning right to go to his second floor math, kept going. Not as a zombie, but as a dreamer, Hugh walked past the lockers of innumerable people, the future generation. He did wake up enough to open his locker, grab his backpack, along with a novel they were required to read for class, and strolled right on out of the school. No one stopped him. Maybe this was the way it was meant to be.
This was how he would live the difference between the dream and reality. He had it all planned out in his head; it took only a second to see the future years that his life would yield. It was not a matter of time or rash decision, for opportunity knocks once in a life time. With this mindset he could be in California in no time, splayed out in a beach chair under an umbrella with a bottle of ginger ale resting on his left thigh, a Hemingway book clumsily perched on his right, and the ocean in front.