A Darker Deep Down Thing

And so life returned to "normal."  Each morning I would get up to the alarm, shower, dress, make breakfast, eat at the metal dining table alone, and drive to school.  In the afternoons, I would go to the hospital to visit my father.  

This was my last semester and my schedule was easy.  I was a student assistant in the library and had Acting II with Jill.  I had gotten so far ahead in my other classes that I just had to wait for everyone else to catch up.  People were getting "senioritis" and the days passed without strife.  When the prom came around, I had no thoughts of going, but there was a movement afoot by others to avoid it, too.  An alternative prom was being planned by the "hipper" kids.  They would meet at the big lake downtown and smoke pot.  I was glad that people were "boycotting" the prom, but I would not go downtown, either.  It seemed silly to me, the excitement over smoking pot and rebelling.  They had come to it far too late, I thought.  I had come to it too early.  

I spent prom night hanging out with Tommy who had not been in school for over three years now.  It was getting more and more difficult to reconcile the various segments of my life.  Fragments.  Drifting.  

Gene, my friend from the pizza parlor job who had been shtupn the cougar, had gotten a girlfriend.  She was small and dark and pretty, and I liked her.  When she talked to me, she would touch me on the arm and look directly into my eyes.  I could feel the heat.  So one day, I went over after school and knocked on her door.  I knew Gene wasn't there, but that is what I asked.  I don't know why I did it.  Yes, I do.  

I felt much the same about Vladi's girlfriend.  She was a cute dirty blonde with eyeteeth like a vampire and the three of us would hang out at Vladi's at night watching TV in the dark, and my body would ache as if with the flu.  At school, when Vladi wasn't around, I'd sit with her and talk, perhaps too intimately.  

Alone in my car, driving, listening to music, dreaming.  I didn't think about those girls so much as feel them, feel their feminine presence, remember the way they smelled, the everyday poetry of just them.  

I wanted what I couldn't have, of course, living in that little cracker box, sleeping on the couch, reading, listening to "strange" musics, thinking, waiting.  

One afternoon, I went by Jill's classroom after school.  I wanted to give her an album that I had gotten from the record store where I used to work, from the owner's son who had gotten a job as a rep for a record company.  It was a strange album that nobody had ever heard of by a French musician, Michael Columbier.  It sounded like her.  That is what I said.  As we sat, awkwardly, but less so, I thought, she said to me, "You are such a sad boy for your age.  Why are you so sad?"  

I had never thought that before and was shocked deep down.  It wasn't a sadness, was it?  It was something else, I thought, some deep, emotional knowing, a way of knowing things without words like notes of a song, something you can put words to but cannot put into words.  But her saying it made me so.  I was sad, I thought now.  I was sad.