Hello. I guess by some grave misfortune you have arrived here. Oh well.
I'll just say that this is for my own personal musings. I like writing trivial nonsense. It gets the steam out of my system from the days when the world is just too much for me, and it's much healthier than slashing your wrists or running in front of moving traffic.
Alright, that was a pretty terrible introduction, but whatever. All I really will say about myself is that I enjoy writing, and I wanted to make a little place to post my own strange musings.
With that said, I wanted to start writing down ideas and chapters for something that has been brewing in my head. So here goes.
Prologue
There's something I keep seeing in my dreams. It always starts off the same way. The two shadows in the distance. Tears dripping down my face. The wind is strong, and as those shadows move closer, I see myself screaming. There are no words coming from my lips, just an incomprehensible noise, an empty noise signifying nothing. I look off into the distance, and everything looks so small. I can see the city lights under the night sky.
A cold hand touches my shoulder as I stand over the city, and in the wind I hear those three words I stopped believing in so long ago. I descend, feeling nothing but the air. I am free. It will end now. It will finally end.
The experience of freefalling makes me vomit into the air. The partially digested chunks of my last dinner, a salmon fillet and a slice of strawberry cake fly into the air, tiny heart shaped chunks scattered in the sky.
I prepare myself for the descent, but as the ground comes closer, I begin to disipate into nothingness.
Chapter 1
The best advice I can give you, always walk on yellows. It's the safest way to walk in the city. If there's a car trying to beat the red, you'll be taking him to the bank. I know what you're thinking, they might be poor or worse off than you. Well, the world is a cruel place and if you aren't ready, it'll eat you alive, bones and all. I don't want to see you crying, needing someone to make things right. The strongest person in your life will always be you.
You're probably wondering why I'm not telling you a story that might make you smile, or laugh, or even put you at ease. Well, this is the only set of life lessons I'll ever give you, so you should take them to heart. After this, just make your own mistakes. Live your own life. It's a dream I sure wish I had.
I grew up in a place just like this, a quiet suburb of Boston. First real memory I have is when I was little, just sitting with my grandpa, watching TV. I never really knew him. I was too young, too uninterested in most things. You probably know the feeling, right? He really did care a lot about me, even though I didn't know him. He took care of me while the folks were at work every day after school. Just when I had grown old enough to start being curious about my roots, Old Grim goes and takes him away. Don't even remember what it was that took him either. I remember the funeral, standing in front of so many people dressed in black, crying out for my grandfather, and putting some of the fake dollars in the fire so he would be ok.
We're like that, you know. Superstitious. I always used to see this "hell money" and never understood it till this moment. I cast the stacks of paper into the fire, and bowed my head to pray.
Growing up was tough for me. My parents worked downtown, and till I was out of kindergarten, I never saw them. We lived in a small apartment till the day we found the little white house near my relatives. Those folks, they'd always be burning the midnight oil, y'know? They still had little bits of their youth left, their joints and hearts not fully hardened by the real world. Kinda hit me hard though. I always wanted the family that I saw on TV, where everyone was together and happy. I had two people who were usually passed out or too tired to deal with me. I only vaguely. Even after my grandpa went on, my grandma would come pick me up from school and take care of me till someone got off work. I would just sit in front of the TV, watching whatever was on. I was kind of like how you are, just looking at the pictures, getting bored, and waiting for something else to show up on the screen. My cousins were all in high school, with their own social dramas to deal with, and being an only child meant I was always alone.
My folks enrolled me in a Catholic school since I was in kindergarten. They weren't religious. It was just close to home, and to my grandma. All I can say is it made me never want to be religious. They'd drag us over to the church, to pray and listen to sermons. The sense that there was someone watching over me felt good, and for I while, I wondered if my life would be better if I put my faith in someone else. Having someone make fun of me for it made me throw all that faith to the curb.
I know, I did have little faith if I was deterred so quickly. I don't see having only a little faith in things to be a bad thing. There are sure as hell enough people who have too much faith. It evens things out in my book.
Grade school was probably one of the best times in my life. Everyone praises you. You don't even have to do anything that special, and they fawn over you. I mean, those standardized tests said I was smart, but those things are full of crap. Don't ever believe them. Standardized tests are what adults think prove everything. They are just full of worthless information you could guess your way through. Aside from running around outside doing nothing, classes were a joke. I just sat around waiting for the days to pass.
It was around 6th grade when I took a test that most of us (by that, I mean our parents) had been waiting to take. I don't remember much about it, aside from sitting in a cafeteria, and filling in bubbles for a few hours. My folks wanted me to take it because it was to go to a place that even my cousin, who my mom always wanted me to be like, didn't get into. The test was the typical standardized test: questions that test basic knowledge of things that are pretty irrelevant to the real world. For those who did well on the exam, there were three schools that were available as a reward who did well. One was the O'Bryant, a school for sciences which was pretty much crap. Above that was Boston Latin Academy, a school my cousin attended and was pretty far away in a community my folks didn't like. The holy grail of them all was the exclusive Boston Latin School, the oldest high school in the country. A place where presidents and other great minds had been educated in the classical manner. This was the place that they yelled at me to get into, and it was certainly better than the nearby high school, which appeared to be a place that pumped out gangbangers.
I still remember my anticipation for it. It had choked me up, worrying me at every second. I remember someone taunting me, and my response was something around the lines of, "Well, I'll be going to Boston Latin and making something of myself, unlike you!" That's actually a pretty funny story, because a few years later, I remember my mom had told me that she had talked to that kid's mom, and he was in jail.
It's important to laugh. There's a lot of times when you'll be sad in life, and laughter is important, regardless of who you laugh at or why you laugh at them. Trust me on this. It keeps your morale up.
Anyways, my mom called me some days later while at work at the local post office. In her hands was the letter that would tell me where I had gotten into. I told her I wanted to open it up myself. That night, I ripped open the top of the letter, and accepted my fate: I had gotten into all three schools. Out of the three hundred students who would be accepted, I had ranked in the top 100. This was without that stupid policy of letting kids in because they're a minority. That's another stupid law in place. They give certain people an advantage of getting in just because they're a different race. It's stupid. Some people are smart because they try hard or know things, and they shouldn't be punished for it. We don't get a taste of it. No sir. They say we get on fine without it. What a load of shit.
I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I get that way sometimes. Just worked up without the right words to say. Here's a lesson for you: an intelligent person can yell at you without swearing. That said, my folks were as dumb as doornails.
Oh right, the letter. I keep forgetting where I was. It was obvious where I would choose to go. The folks were ecstatic. They usually were. If all you had left was to live out your sad, deferred dreams out on your kids, you'd be happy when they do well too.
The only thing I needed to prepare was my clothes. Catholic schools are only nice for one reason: you don't get a chance to dress cool. You just wear the uniform, and sit there. I may have had to take a test to get in, but this was a public school. I knew dressing like I had in school photos would probably not be good. I asked my mom to buy me some jeans, so I'd fit in and look normal.
Fitting in and looking normal are important. Those people who tell you to be yourself are full of crap. Once people really get to know you and accept you as you are, that's when you can be yourself, regardless of how weird you are. I've always been a weird one. It's not my fault I think. I had missing parents for the first 7 years of my life, then they became parents who were too guarded and suffocating. The kind who watched one too many news reports and thought, "Wow, being alive is dangerous! We'd better lock our kid inside and never let him go out!" Not a joke. I never went outside much as a kid. Maybe once in a while in the winter to go sledding. but other than that no. Going to a library? Full of pedophiles. Going to the park? Home for gangs to fight out turf wars. Walking down the street? Strangers that want to kidnap you. You can see how it may have been hard for me to be normal. The best bet I'd say is just fake it. Just try to act like the people on TV. You'll fool everyone.
We should go to sleep. It's gotten late, and every time I think of high school, I get angry. Sleep tight.
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