Submission: "Young Blood"
I spend nearly every evening after I get off of work in my car parked by the elementary school just a few blocks away from my house. I tell myself that I park there because it’s conveniently close, but it’s really because being by an elementary school, and seeing the swings, and the slides, and the jungle-gyms, makes me feel like I’m still a kid.
As I sit there and smoke a cigarette, I look back at the past seven months. I think about how things are so different, but really just the same, and I think about the last Friday night of my high school career.
It was a damp night, I remember--like most nights in Oregon. I was wound up on angst and the potential of what was to come. I had just gotten into another fight with my parents, this time about smoking. I remember so distinctly what my father yelled at me as I stormed out our front door, “Smoking seems cool now, and so does being miserable, but if you keep this going, they’ll both rot you from the inside-out, Sam!”
I remember getting into my best friend’s car and driving to ‘our spot’. I staggered out her car, a white 2000 Chrysler Voyager, and scratched my head under the flickering street lamp that hovered over me like a spotlight.
Sometimes it’s okay to act your age, I said to her.
I picked off the old cigarette papers that stuck to the soles of my shoes, and lit another. I had made her a mixed CD earlier that year, and it was playing in the background.
Sonic Youth began to play as we both inhaled and stared out at the rain, then Jeff Buckley, Mazzy Star, Radiohead, and Stone Roses. We would look at each other, and we were both aware of how cliche our lives seemed. It made us smile.
If I look back at the past year, I saw countless trips in my best friends van to our spot where we would hold frivolous conversations about what awaited us after graduation--our eyes watery with contemplation, and fear, and excitement--and now that day was right in front of us.
Graduation was a blur, along with the few months that followed.
It was countless summers evenings spent scrounging coins, bills, and whatever we could for another fix of what we could get our hands on. We would walk the streets, fluorescent-lit paths, and recite lyrics like bible verses. Each night ended with us laying in the grass at Avery Park; the air seemed to smell sweet and sticky like the oils from a leaf on eucalyptus tree. We would look up at the sky, sobering up; it always seemed forged, like a sheer covering, if you could just reach up there, and pull it down, what do you think would be there, I remember my best friend’s voice sounding like a human question mark.
I would say, Nothing. Nothing would be there, then we would look at each other and laugh.
I fast-forward to now, sitting in my car, and remember feeling so hopeful. In high schoolI thought to myself, “I can’t wait until I get out there, to start my life.” They don’t prepare you for the ‘in-between’ in high school, the feeling of being in-limbo between being a kid, and an adult. It could be because I didn’t really change anything--I still live at home, I go to a community college, and I live in the same town with the same people--I’m essentially the same person I was six months ago, except I no longer have the pleasure of blaming my misery on being in high school.
In high school you’re allowed to think that your misery is other people’s problem, that they have some sort influence on it, but now I realize that everyone has their own misery-inducing baggage, and that other people don’t care. If you hold onto it, it’s your own to carry and to deal with it.
Sometimes I miss high school, but just because I miss feeling like my anger, angst, and confusion were justified. Now I’m not sure they’ll ever go away.
The rain hits my windshield, and it’s just above freezing temperature as Modest Mouse’s “Float On” is playing: I see this image of a highway as I sit here. This image of people’s lives, their souls, floating past me in this highway, like rushing cars, and I just stay where I am, I can’t move. Everyone around me has a sense of direction, or do they?
When you’re in high school, you think, “I can’t wait to start my life”, but then you’re in college and you think the same thing, then again when you have a career, and a family, and then one day you wake up and you’re forty, and think, “Wait. What was that all before? Was that my life?”
Growing up is the hardest thing people have to do. No amount of schooling can prepare you for it, or for the six months after high school graduation; you get a glimpse of the sort of monotonous, bleak truth. There isn’t anything you can do to prepare, all you can really do is sit in your car, completely self-aware, smoke a cigarette, and hope to God this is just a prolonged teenage-angst phase.
[Submission by unslakable-thirsting. Submit your own writing or art via our submission button!]
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