Your father will be awake, yelling things at the television, but your mother will be asleep. Walk past your father. He won�t even notice. Find solace in your room. Read a book. Stare at the phone. Will it to ring. It�ll just sit there, dormant, unassuming, waiting for you to make the first move. You will be sick of making the first move. You won�t be able to confront the phone anymore. It�ll be just too much. You will start to hate your room and it will start to hate you back. The walls will appear bare and intimidating, like blank slates and canvases, secretly storing the secrets and memories of adolescence. The door will tower over you, dwarfing you, letting you know there is no safety, no protection for the defeated. Run out of the room, past your father. He�ll call out, �Hey, when did you get home!� More of a statement than a question. Respond with, �Just now, but I�m leaving again. See ya!� Run out and then back in the house to get a coat. �That was fast,� your father will say. This tired old joke needs to be euthanized, you find yourself thinking. Run into the house, grab the coat, and run back out, ignoring your father as he calls out, �Taking off again?� Admire his persistence with such an old, horrible joke. Think: At least he sticks to his guns. Walk out to your car, put the key in the door slot, and then feel the night envelop you. Remove the key and decide to walk. You have no destination anyway. Might as well walk to nowhere instead of driving to nowhere. Neither method will take you anywhere anyway. Nothing takes you anywhere anymore. Notice the small trees the homebuilders have planted to give the neighborhood a nice �community� feeling. Decide to hate the buildings, the monuments surrounding you. Decide that the doors and the walls and the ceilings and the fences are all way too tall. Think, if Manute Bol lived here, this might be acceptable, even appropriate. But Manute Bol lives in Sudan and Manute Bol doesn�t care about your community or how tall the buildings are. Feel the cracks on the sidewalk. Remember when you used to walk home from school as a kid. The houses were smaller then. The sun was brighter. The trajectory of the rocks you kicked home was straighter. The wandering thoughts jettisoned with virility. Nothing lingered. Think of the things that linger now. Think of the things you didn�t say or the places you didn�t visit. The trees will hang over the sidewalk like your inventory of regrets. The sky will scrape the road like a dentist�s tool upon your teeth. A car will drive by, turning your eyes into glow-in-the-dark children�s toys. The kind you put in a box and your mother threw away along with your comic books and basketball cards. And you never confronted her about it. Just like you never told her you loved her. Just like you never cried or raised your voice in front of her. She must think you�re so happy, you find yourself thinking. These are the things that don�t jettison from your mind. These are the things that linger. Walk a little longer. You aren�t quite done yet. Your mind skips from relationships to friendships, work to school, past compromises to future commitments. Decide that your life is a negotiation. Remember the play Inherit the Wind. Remember the scene where Colonel Drummond addresses the jury, saying, �Sometimes I think there's a man behind a counter who says 'All right, you can have a telephone; but you'll have to give up privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote; but at at price; you lose the right to retreat behind a powder puff or a petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air; but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.'� Think back to an Ornithological Studies class you took. You learned everything about birds and you hated it. You wanted the mystery, the intrigue of looking up at those spectacular flying creatures and being amazed without reason. Think back to the beginnings of civilization, when a man would look up at the stars and wonder what he was seeing. Magic from a god, a higher being, someone more capable than himself. Or perhaps holes poked into his encasing dome. At any rate, it must have been beautiful, an array of shining specks of refraction, an illusion of movement in a static world. Look at the stars now. They�re still beautiful but knowing their constellations and gaseous compounds has taken something from them. Something unnamable but something inexhaustible. Walk home. Think, I�m so young and so alone. Think about the person who said the price for greatness is loneliness. Wonder if this qualifies you as great. Wonder if this is some other negotiation life has handed you. Some compromise. The birds have lost their wonder and the clouds, now categorized as cumulus or nimbus or cirrus or stratus, reek intoxicatingly of gasoline. Enter your living room, sort of hoping your father will tell the same stale joke, but notice him asleep in his chair. Walk quietly into your room and turn off the light. Lay in your bed in silence for a while, trying to keep your mind as blank as your walls until you eventually fall into the uncomfortable restlessness of sleep. These are your nights. This is the way you spend your time on earth. |