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For many, in high school, the decisions were easy and required no thought: I am going to do what my old man did, what my hero did, what they did. It was a process to go through that had very little to do with life, or living. I like to call it living on the metric-system, when all of the actions you need to take have been calculated by someone else, by the past, and the emotional gratification is assumed to be happening all the while. The moment you stop to smell the flowers, when you realize you are not really feeling anything, you have been left behind. Or, have you? Is this not a process every one ends up questioning at some point in thier life? For me, the definition of life, often practiced through living, was the only lesson I was determined to learn in my youth. For me, it was the education I searched for. For Jennifer, and most people, there was a fine line between surviving and asking why. For everyday that school was the same, and only the lesson-plans change, there was a life at home that was so unstable that the very thought of balance might have done better to never exist at all.

For many of us, when you went home, there was no one. If your mom was at home, you just went over to someone else’s house. There, you would have the place to yourself, and room to explore everything out there. Sometimes you blew up the garage, but mostly you talked with your friends, drank liquor, and smoked dope, delving into the questions of the universe, and listening to the tunes of yesterday. Once the question of what is the world as a whole got to a stalemate in the conversation, and everyone had an idea of where everyone else’s head is at, the more personal of questions came out. The conversation would naturaly evolve into the real questions we had in our heads. Personally, I had more than one circle of friends. I tend to wander in large circles, with the new edge of music being my divining-rod. Jennifer, also, moved around.

As I got to know her, and her family; I fell into a chasm as deep as her hazel-eyes. A pool of love defined by her actions and my heart. She lived in an exclusive neiborhood. The kind of neiborhood that had a golf course in the middle, a giant brick-wall en-trapping the entire suburb, and security gates all around. Her home was a beautiful, two-story house, and her bedroom had the largest four-poster bed I had ever seen. We would talk for hours about anything and everything beneath that pink canopy.