All of us want to be saved, I think. But it gets us wrapped up in one of those conundrums. To save ourselves, we have to save others, like dragging a mangy dog out of raging floodwaters; it snaps and bites and claws at us in the water, but licks our faces on dry land. The only problem is that sometimes we don’t know we’re in the water to begin with.
I like to think I know how to swim, but a good undertow can catch anyone off guard. Sometimes I don’t want to come up for air, and it seems like it would be easier to just take a deep breath and embrace the cold.
My blinders have been on for the past twenty years of my life, and I can’t believe I once felt content to scramble along, simply trying to fly unseen. You can’t be unseen anymore. The little plastic shell holstered on my belt means there’s never any alone anymore. Alone is that moment between two text messages.
It’s another form of drowning. Surrounded by faces and voices, shells and personas, barking their own desires and dreams. What matters is when you start stealing them. When the good of your own hopes are sneakily exchanged for what you’ve been told is good for you. It’s that day when you lay down your wooden sword and your dreams and decide, maybe the money is important after all.
Those are the bad days.
But you catch glimpses. Snatches of orange sky melting into blue and pink, smeared across the whole sky like a painter on acid just begging to capture every last detail of God’s creation. So I don’t believe in God. I can still pretend.
The light smell of cut grass on the breeze in the summertime that highlights the intense green of life, with all its shapes and textures. You want to kneel down and touch it all, right? Well, you would, if you weren’t so afraid of people thinking you’re crazy. If I wasn’t so afraid of people thinking I was crazy.
What is it that takes your breath away at these moments? And why can’t we always live with that sense of breathless ecstasy?
“It’s all in the cards,” I said.
“Cards?” Susan asked.
“Sorry, nothing.” Slipped up again. The filter was wearing thin lately.
“What are the chances of class being cancelled?”
It was a perfectly clear spring day, about fifty degrees, and barring sickness or the mother of all unexpected blizzards, we weren’t getting out of it. “Small.”
She sulked under the weight of a backpack twice her own width. “I didn’t read again last night.”
“Me either.”
“Yeah, but you can get away with it. How do you come up with all that crap you spout off in class?”
“You mean the stuff relating to the dichotomy between character and social class, inhibited as a result of the latent psychic tension from dysfunctional representations of societal interaction?”
She stared at me. “You don’t know what half those words mean, do you?”
I was damn sure even the professors didn’t know what they meant. “By heart.”
Susan shook her head. “I should hire you to write material for me. Stuff to spew out during long discussions.”
“Come on, just grab a literary encyclopedia and memorize a few terms.”
“Maybe I want to be genuine,” she snapped. One of her mood changes. I was used to them.
“Genuine, eh?” Did that exist? Christ I was in a sour mood. The sun was beaming down off Shackelton Hall and searing my retinas. All kinds of people were out on the quad, but I’d be damned if I could keep my eyes on them for more than a second.
“Comps are going to kill me,” Susan whined.
“You started yet?”
“Of course! Haven’t you wondered where I’ve been the past few weeks? No, of course you wouldn’t,” she muttered, “If I didn’t track you down I doubt I’d ever see you. It’s not like you’d ever go to the library for anything.”
“Place scares me.” All those faceless books, dust jackets removed and probably recycled into plastic bottle labeling, staring down from the stacks. Too much content to ever read, too hopeless to ever try.
“Do you ever wonder if you’re in the right field?”
“No.” Only every minute of every day.
“Stop shuffling, we’ll be late.”
“Would Penman even notice?”
“She’s an attendance nazi, Shawn.”
“Screw her. Let’s hit up D-Hall.” Lunch would be much more fulfilling than an hour long lecture on the nature of the sublime in Goethe’s prose.
