On Saturday of this last week our hero was messaged by a person from the past, an acquaintance really, but, in his ever susceptible state he was taken aback, and suddenly found himself retreating to that very past in which he met her. Using his senior high-school yearbook as a time travel device, he discovered faces and names he had all but abandoned, and found himself spiralling downward into a sea of endless questionings to which he still hasn’t found answers.

In an effort to pry open some form of clarity, some kind of resolution (in a situation that may not even have any), our hero found himself today going back even farther, using his ninth grade yearbook this time.

The time was 1997 and our hero was pressed to choose between two warring factions. On the one side was his mother, stepfather and little sister, who had just gotten a brand new house. He’d be going to Flannigan high had he chosen to be with them. But, despite the friendship he had with his sister, how could he handle the daily guilt of his mother and the sinister accusations of his stepfather(explained only by request)? On the other side was his father, also in a new home, positioned right next to Western High-school. In either situation our hero would find himself an alien on a planet where everyone else had already formulated a language. Would he be able to assimilate on either world?

Our hero choose to side with his father, and thus irrepairable damage was done. His mother scorned him and felt betrayed, and the one week on, one week off, joint custody that our hero had through his childhood was destroyed, and he’d never get it back. Now he would be over his mother’s every other weekend. Though she’d pass it off as a friendly loss, she’d never forgive him for his actions.

One of the reasons our hero chose Western was that his closest companion of the time, Patrick Jordan would possibly be attending school with him, and the thought of having someone, anyone, that he knew, let alone a close associate, was very comforting. Unfortuanately, two weeks before close would begin, Patrick would explain to our hero that because of district lines, he’d have to go to Piper High. The friendship tapered off by the middle of the third semester, and the two would never communicate again.

So, our hero, still without much of an identity, and with half his family scorning him, set off on a brand new adventure in a strange place. He’d hoped that ridicule and humiliation that he’d felt at his middle school Driftwood would float away like that institution’s namesake, but it was not to be. In Drama especially, our hero found the natives to be quick in finding new ways to make his life unbearable. They invented new nicknames. Even the boys friends grew tired of him rather quickly, and he found himself alone.

He never built anything stronger than an acquaintance that year, but, as luck would have it, our hero did find that identity that had been running from him all his life. It was in his English class, during an assignment in which students were asked to present a song that was inspiring to him. He watched as other boys and girls brought up meaningful songs. He stared in awe at a young Patrick Mathis who chose “Justified Black Eye” by the group No Use For A Name. He would grow to love this boy, not mutually, but obsessively in quiet solitude. And eventually when he tired of that, he would grow to be this boys friend.

But it wasn’t the ferocity in which Patrick read his lyrics that moved our hero that day. It was the boy’s own presentation. On the busride there, the boy had decided to pen his own song, about the lack of good television. The boy referenced one show after another, trashing them all in a rage that spoke of a wisdom beyond his tender years.

Our hero was met with a peculiar sensation: Applause. How could those who’d sworn to ruin him suddenly praise him? Our hero didn’t look for answers, but instead quickly set to work on other songs. Each one became more popular than the next, until the boy hit a rut, repeated himself too much, and like all things that become succesful, became oversaturated, deflated by his own happiness and the desire to keep it afloat.

While our hero stopped writing the silly songs, weeks later, he was approached by his english teacher about a poetry reading being held that night at his local library. Sure the proposed extra credit he would recieve was tempting, however, something else was driving him to want to be there that night. The day was January 13th, the eve of his fifteenth birthday.He rushed home, and eagerly begged his father to take him. Our hero relinquished the opportunity for a big dinner out, and arrived at the library with two new poems he’d just scribbled out during rather dull lectures in math and earth space science respectively.

Our hero enjoyed reading the poems immensely and thus was transformed. He immediately set to work on new pieces with the same fervor he showed for the silly songs a few weeks prior. Unlike the songs though, this craving would grow and grow. He went on to write more and more, and built his life around it. He dressed as he thought a writer would dress, would go on to join the literary club, enter contests, and try his hands at other forms of writing.

In the bridging years since then and where our hero is now, he has encountered many unique people through this particular career choice, and has felt many bizarre feelings. The choice has robbed him of many dreams, but has also birthed new ones he never thought to exist in his previous form. He has used that darkness that brews within him to find a path scarcely walked upon.

The choice has given him everything he has, and also taken away much of what he loved. There are those sleepless nights, where he is kicking and thrashing against the pillows where he wonders why. There are those mornings when the razor cuts fresh into his skin that he wonders how he can keep doing it. There are those afternoons where he sits clueless as to what tomorrow will bring. And whether or not he’ll have a place in it.

He thinks back particularly to that night he first heard his own voice traversing through the sinews of a microphone, and the emotions that would reverberate back and echo in his soul. And overall he thinks to that year, a year when nothing became something, when, out of the thiness of the very air, something invisible, something intangible, touched him with a power that would never leave him.

Last 5 posts by Mike Lawrence

• There is Freedom Within, There is Freedom Without - March 31st, 2006
• The Ides of Starch - March 15th, 2006
• Correctional Felicity - February 14th, 2006
• "Ride My Cattle - January 17th, 2006
• Sandy Clause - December 22nd, 2005