Concepts (First Half)

Time is difficult to understand but easy to accept. That’s my conclusion. Digging deep into the far corners of the cerebellum can result in a sleepless night or two, or three, or more. It is 5:21. Cerebellum… crumble eel, celeb lemur… That one’s too hard. Everyone’s been here I think. I can’t be the only one at Clear Ridge still up thinking about why we have thoughts, dreaming about sleeping and waiting for morning to come. It always boils down to concepts that I don’t think I’ll grasp.

It makes a smooth transition from staying up mindlessly watching Bill Nye re-runs until roughly two, to settling down and thinking about some philosopher. I play this game where I try to debate them on their own philosophies, I usually end up winning, but I am both sides of the argument. That’s when the anxiety hits. What if both my parents have died in their sleep? I get up, go check. I’m always surprised that I’m surprised that they were alive. Repeat these thoughts for the next hour or so. Then the depression nestles its way into bed with me like a blanket of black sludge. I feel trapped. My friends could all have died tonight. What would I do? What if Russia just bombed an innocent town? I role-play the tragic thoughts that those fictitious families feel for fake freedom from the thoughts the feed on my mind. But it doesn’t help.
 It’s 5:58. Morning.

I never found my place, at least that’s what they are telling me I’m supposed to find. Basketball didn’t go well. Neither did ceramics. That was freshman year and I was off to a poor start at Clear Ridge One could say I never recovered. I shouldn’t even been at Clear Ridge, this breeding ground of human filth. The people that pass me in masses and pretend like I’m a ghost are just genuinely bad people. Maybe I’m the bad one, and maybe these are what people are supposed to be like and maybe I should adapt like Darwin told me, but I wouldn’t “be myself”.

I’ve been in and out of therapy for a while, and I can’t remember when I start. I don’t really sleep that much anymore. It’s all her fault.

The day is hazy in my memory, but I remember her crying. She didn’t try to hide them as them streaked down her cheek. They fell like boulders. There are times when you shed tears with strength, with perseverance, with courage. This wasn’t one of those times. She sat on the hazel couch in our small apartment six years, four months and seventeen days ago and wept like a weak animal while I looked on in disgust. I was too young to attack the man that eerily crept out of the backdoor as she spouted excuses, but I couldn’t. Her lies were white noise. It wasn’t his fault, he probably didn’t know she was married. It was all her fault.

I was feeling sick and since I lived so close to Clear Ridge, I chose to walk home in pain rather than call her, that way she wouldn’t yell at me. It was roughly one in the afternoon, so the walk was comforting even in pain due to the welcoming spring of Phoenix. My father was working while I had walked in on my mother, and I immediately told him. He wasn’t surprised, maybe he expected it. My mom and this man were right on the couch and I opened the door not expecting it, as if anyone could. I was old enough to know what was going on. He jumped up and left as soon as his empty eyes hit me. She was screaming. I think that’s when I found out I wasn’t a normal kid. I didn’t cry, I didn’t yell, I just knew that I would never look at my mother the same. My parents divorced four months later. I’m with my dad now. I don’t trust women anymore. I don’t trust anyone anymore.

But then I met her. I know you are sighing as another troubled teen finds his true love, but I swear this one is different. Maybe I’m biased.

Middle School was a strange time for me. They gave me a lot of tests with really nice ladies and I usually didn’t have to do much of the work that was assigned to my friends. I was given the work for a couple grades ahead of me. It didn’t matter, it was still incredibly easy. Around 6^th grade is when I realized this was becoming a social issue for me, not that I didn’t have enough of those problems. I couldn’t make friends in either grades. I was trapped in a nether of too smart for my classmates, but too young for the older kids. I hated it, I just wanted to live a normal life at the time. I still do. I started failing the tests to get moved back down. I hated being smart, and knowing all the answers means it’s easy to get them wrong. My parents couldn’t afford for me to get to a snobby, “everyone is special in their own way” high school. My parents didn’t seem to care that I was so smart, but I cared even less. I got a 162 out of 200 on the Phoenix Public School Entrance Exam on purpose. An 81%. That’s a C. I was finally average.

And about three weeks into high school I had realized what an awful, immature mistake I had made. On the third day of my freshman year, Brizzy Kleins asked if Oregon was one of the original thirteen colonies, justifying it with her in-depth expertise at “Oregon Trail”. I watched Renata Williams try to multiply eight times four, turns out the answer is not twelve. This continued every day for the first year of my Clear Ridge experience. I sat in the back of class rooms calculating how long a “bathroom break” could be without it getting unreasonable. Through trial and error in all of my classes, I came to the conclusion of about nine minutes. Nine minutes so I could get away from all the other insignificant specters of kids that I should be around. Nine minutes so I could replay the day I watched my mom cry over and over again. Nine minutes so I could reason with Nietzsche, Foucault, and Zeno. The other forty-four minutes of my class were spent spinning pens and drowning out teachers. I still aced the tests.

Year two was better. Two years, nine months and four days ago Mr. Schelmer marked me off a point on an essay for using the word “better”. I still spite him for it.