It’ll happen one day after school. You’ll have just come home from a grueling six hour haze of pubescent body heat, annoying laughs, and whiteboard math. It’s not the school you have so much of a problem with but the mammals that inhabit the place. It’s the smell. It’s the shiny waxed floors that school is ever so proud of. It’s the same four brands of clothes that every male student wears – a rotation of commercialized sweaters, chinos, and pocket tees. Everyone wears each other and they are all the same.

The day starts out with statistics. You sit in the front of the class and don’t say two words for the hour and a half block period. You listen the chewed up, thoughtless, attention-seeking words drooling out of your fellow classmates medicated mouths. There’s at least four kids in this class that you are sure do not take Adderall for its intended effect of curbing attention deficit disorder. It’s used for midnight studying, homecoming football games, and drag racing. The lesson about car dealerships and the stock market ends, you stand by the door, or the lack thereof, your school is one architectural enigma, there are no doors save in the life science classrooms, just wide gaping rectangular holes in the walls that swallow students ten at a time. The “doors” are metal gates that the teachers awkwardly slide open and closed with an ear splitting shriek at the beginning and end of class, respectively. It is impossible to stand alone. There is no such thing as solidarity, even when you’re nice. Friends come up from behind and slap you on the back of your neck, it stings like hell and you let out a pointed slur of “f***” and “b****” as well as the other necessary parts of speech to create a faux-literate sentence, you and your friends make jokes about each other’s sexual orientation, they make fun of you for being vegetarian, you reply with the classic “f*** you.” The bell rings and the migration begins. Your locker isn’t far from class and you go out of your way to walk next to the cute sophomore girl that you have only recently begun a friendly relationship with and who happens to have the math class across the hall at the same time you have statistics. She’s really something. Tiny and just as hopeless as you. Cute as all hell. You somehow manage to make her smile, your day has suddenly been given purpose and you can deem yourself a success. You find your locker feeling like hot s*** and are just able to drown out your friends’ video game talk as you focus on the six digit combo to get inside.

The muffins in the school’s cafeteria are toxic and taste like cardboard. You never eat there anyways but just the sight of them makes your mouth go dry. Myriad idle, pointless, pandering chatter mounting to deafening yelling that suffocates your ears. Being surrounded by conversation pressures you to talk to your friends…there is absolutely nothing to talk about. Break’s over. The next class starts in five minutes, but you have a free period. You consider for half a second finding the cute sophomore and asking her if she wants to skip class and go get some food with you. In that half a second you play out the whole scenario, the whole day, every outcome good and bad. By the end of that half second you have found some excuse not to find her and pursue. Whether it’s “you’re saving your money for something, remember?” which you’re not, or “I don’t know where we would go,” you do, that one independent coffee shop only five minutes away. She loves that place…she even suggested you two go there sometime, another implausible excuse, “she wouldn’t want to go,” of course she wants to go.

You end up reading in the cafeteria. The librarian doesn’t believe you have a free period and won’t let you into the library without written proof, which you lack, so you end up at the sticky pressboard tables of the cafeteria. Bell rings. Your next class is journalism; you’re in charge of the monthly school newspaper. You read and re-read stories about lunch ladies, cars, high school sports, television shows, concerts, global warming, recently deceased celebrities, air conditioning, droughts, and terrorists. You and your friend are the only two left in the class that have been around since sophomore year. That’s three whole years and you two are Co-Editors in chief. You don’t mind sharing the title, it’s enough work with two people anyways and your friend is a beautiful blonde girl and you constantly wonder why she is even friends with you she’s so beautiful. Maybe it’s because she’s so awkward and kooky and self-conscious, which she really has no reason to be. She’s a beautiful person inside, outside, sideways, and upside down. It’s an hour and a half of dizzying scrutiny, making every word count, discouraging pontification, getting every by-line in line. You need to get this thing to print in three days and you’re heart rate gets to be well over one hundred beats a minute. The doctors refuse to prescribe you anything.

School’s out, the day is done. The multitudes of beings scurry off down one of the two ways away from the school. The middle class live to the left, the poor and the immigrant to the right. Thousands of kids, once feet away from each other, go their separate ways in the universe. They distance themselves accidentally on purpose, oblivious to one another’s daily mundane lives, not caring, never giving a s***. You drive home in the hot stiffness on the family van. It’s been heating up in the asphalt parking lot all day and by the time you get home you’re on the brink of sweating.

     You have to park the bulky vehicle across the street because it’s Monday and the trash barrels are out on the curb in front of your house where you usually park. It is nothing but a minor inconvenience. You walk across the street, up the slightly inclined driveway, through the shaded patio where nobody ever sits, and into the bright coolness of your house. Your mom is scurrying about the kitchen cleaning various surfaces and wearing her half-pajama half-slip getup that she usually never gets out of on the weekends. It reminds you of depression and hopelessness and it always makes you hate yourself when she wears this kind of stuff. Your mother is incredibly self-conscious and material to the point of annoyance. She is cleaning the house on this particular occasion because your father was recently rewarded with a two hour maid cleaning service for selling the most magazine subscriptions and your parents were planning on making use of the service today, and your mom wants the house to look presentable for the maid…the maid that is about to be hired to clean your house. She has swept the hardwood floors and there are a number of tiny mountains of dust and grime and crumb and hair sporadically stationed throughout the house. You and your mother exchange the customary post school shakedown: “Hi.” “Hi! How was your day?” “Good.” “That’s good,” before you make your way across the living room into the back hall and into your room, taking special care to tip toe around the hills of dirt and dust that must not, at all costs, be disturbed.

Your room is a mess. Pieces of lint and various other patented brands of s*** are buried into your brown carpet and there are toppling stacks of books every. There is a pile of stagnant clothes forming at the foot of your bed – another spilling over onto your desk from the swivel chair underneath. Your window is open and the curtains closed, making the room much darker and cooler than the rest of the house and its heat of manual labor and stress and self-consciousness. You let your backpack slide off your shoulders and onto the floor. You kick off your blue canvas shoes and sit on the edge of your bed, taking in the details of your room that you see every day – they never change. Everything looks still and sad.

In a sudden fit of silence and stillness the entire day’s events hit you and you are suddenly heavy and exceptionally exhausted. You fall sideways on your bed and fall asleep faster than you thought you would.
     

You explode crying bloody murder with the words “What the hell,” or maybe “Where the hell” barely audible through the murmur of post-sleep disorientation on your lips and the feeling of death deep in your chest cavity. You can’t tell what words you woke up screaming, you were still lost and not available to take notice of the incomprehensible syllables of worry and panic as you let them fly. You’re heavier than even before you fell asleep and your body feels like one solid block of some gelatinous mass. The sweat that formed a thin layer of your entire body as you slept has dried and is now terribly cold and off-putting. You struggle to open your eyes and focus, partly because you fell asleep with your contacts on and they have dried and aren’t focusing too well, which doesn’t help. But something else is not right. Something deep in the recesses of your heart and head. You cannot tell if your heart is beating much too fast or not at all. Death. Dying, that’s what it is. You’re overcome with the silent realization of the inevitability of the hopeless situation that stands before you, your next 60 or 70 years of life, and it suddenly comes back to you. The details are unfortunately fuzzy but the concept utter fear is there. You dreamt of death…something about a forest, yes, you were in some kind forest and it was very dark. You walk among the perfectly still and vertical trees that deny all access to the stratosphere, on the perfectly still and quiet ground blanketed with the remnants of the trees that got too tired to hold on anymore. Leaves and pine needles mostly. You’re walking, you don’t know for how long or for what purpose. It’s a robotic action. You suddenly stop and sit on the soft welcoming ground, Indian style, which is odd considering you were never flexible enough to sit in this position comfortably at all in your conscious state. You sit but it doesn’t take long for your eyes to grow heavy and your neck to grow tired. You slowly fall sideways onto the ground, just as you fell onto your bed an eternity ago…but that doesn’t even cross your mind. There’s something inside of you, in this dream, that’s telling you this is no normal sleep, it is much more absolute and has a much greater exclamation point of finality to it. You know it’s death, but you’re much too tired to argue or even consider the gravity of the situation, it doesn’t seem to matter, and lay on the ground on your side in the fetal position anyways. You see yourself fall away, an outside observer now. You’re being lifted up and up into the darkness of the tree tops, but at the same time you haven’t moved an inch. It is only your body and the ground it’s resting on that is dropping out from below your feet and no matter how hard you try, you are not able to lift your eyes upwards, not able to look away from yourself and look up to see where you are going. You can only assume it’s more darkness.