Glass

They started shooing us off the grounds when we graduated, so we took to the A&P parking lot on the other side of the fence. The graduating class seems to get younger every year; they’ve begun to stare at me as if I was something vestigial. I know the feeling, though. We weren’t the only ones that had fell through the cracks. I’d met most of the other ghosts while still in school; they haunted the seven-eleven. I used to stare at them the same way these kids stare at me. I remembered telling myself there was no way that I could end up like them. I wondered what had sapped all their ambition; why they didn’t just turn around and start walking away, never look back. Some of them did, I guess, but not many.
It nearly took place overnight from me. I was finally out of school and I’d managed to get by without writing out any college applications. I knew I had to go, I just always put it off. And I kept putting it off. You get swept away with the tide and before you know it you can’t help going through the motions, tossing you to and fro, restlessly, against your will until you have none left and you forget what it’s like to be on shore. You wait for it to drown you, but it never does. You just sit there and grind your teeth as the years go by, milking those tender high school romances for as much as they’re worth.
I’d met you when I was still in school. I was terrified at the time, but one look at you put my mind at ease. You’d always figure something out, and you did, like dealing drugs to the kids that go to the school we once went to. If it wasn’t an exploit or actually profitable you’d be a genius.
But you had bigger dreams back then. We were hungry for anything to believe and with those eyes you could promise anything. Sometimes you can still evoke those moments where you could probably convince someone murdering them was somehow euthanasia, but for the most part, you’re just as washed up as the rest of us. The sun beats down and accentuates my hallucinations.
It’s nice to take refuge in the kids. Their necks that resemble exotic birds, wearing their dad’s cologne and never quite sure when to stop pronouncing their chests. They all gawk at me. They remind me of geese, with swimmies on, inexorably stubborn, bizarre and outraged. They squawk until the day they all take flight at once and disappear, but the next generation has already replaced their memory, gawking at you in their place, inexplicably solving life with cell phone programs and leaving you to wonder who comes up with the names of the Antidepressants they take.
I watch them roll out of school, sauntering like nomads in the distance, veiled by a sand storm; for a second I wonder if they’ve come to dethrone me. They’re totally unaware of anything but themselves. Who writes these childhood stories? Who catalogs them, does the abridging, sums everything up into a single paragraph and ships them off as digestible. They breathe life into this dead town; getting into car wrecks, flinging themselves off of buildings. These kids can make suicide look hip, cool, and fashionable.
These are the same kids I grew up with, they haven’t changed. They might look different and sport alien technologies, but they’re the same kids. There’s got to only be around twelve of them, at most. The rest are just copies, there to fill the role. Their drugs don’t change. They’ll namedrop the newest hallucinogen, then quickly blow all their parents’ money on weed. Some of them go out on a limb and try cocaine or Ecstasy, but it isn’t common. The ones that do get mailed off to rehab before they can actually develop a habit.
A girl yesterday tried to write us a check. I had to remind her and she blushed in a frenzy, whirring back into a state of nonchalance. These kids aren’t human; you can’t fight them, they’ll just return year after year to outlive you. They’re immortal. I think: there’s no way I had the balls to look at my drug dealer like that. My drug dealer would have kicked my ass. These kids, on the other hand, scare me. They’re unflappable, sneering in the face of danger. They make me feel like such a simple creature, so uneventful, cursed to my huge, boring thoughts.
I don’t spoil the wonder for these kids. I don’t want to tell them they’ll just be tossed to the curb soon and forgotten about, like the rest of us. I enjoy their preternatural company. I feel like I am in the presence of Greek gods. I don’t cut their drugs. No substances that would kill them in their stead. Just the good stuff. Most of them know when to back off, when the waters become too treacherous for them to wade any further. Some of them are suckers and become a victim of their own whims, turning up later as road-kill or as merely ghosts, like us.
We used to talk to help us get over the downs. We barely look at each other anymore. You remind me a lot of your dad; watching TV in a dilapidated rocking-chair, the one your mother nursed you in, exiled to watch crime dramas for eternity. Thinking about such tragedies becomes too burdensome with age. There’s nothing you can’t eventually walk off.
Grinding each day by on amphetamines. There’s nothing you can’t insignificantly pass the time with on speed. No end to the useless knowledge. I even surprise myself sometimes. Hours will pass by before I even realize what I’m doing. I try to fast-forward my entire life, but each time the high ends I fall even further behind. I trick myself into thinking my immediate world actually matters. If the mind isn’t restricted to the present it starts to wander, and once a mind starts wandering it won’t stop, forgetting the way it came like a dog that loses itself in the woods every day. It would find itself again if it lost itself in something other than the woods, but it has no where else to lose itself.
You don’t dream anymore. You claim you never did, but you used to roil with dreams. You stank of them. You’d make these urgent, whimpering noises whenever you did. I’ve seen other people make them while they were dreaming. Have I become a mere shell too? Have I hallowed out, like you?
We are so dull with excess. We indulge until there’s nothing left to. The novelty they must feel, these kids! And to think I was once one, too; that I still could be. I want to leave you there, you dreamless thing; how do you live? All I see when I look at you is the carcasses of dreams. You stare at everything the way your father stares at his TV.
Then you’ll say something uncanny and prove that there’s something buried in that head, somewhere. We both lie here, digging out of our own heads. If you don’t take all the regret with a grain of salt, there sheer weight of it will strike you dead on the spot.
Even in regret, we overindulge. Your head oozes with nostalgia. It spills everywhere. You are like a dumb robot, walking around with your brain left open.
“Why do we even bother? Could work a nine-to-five and make more money than this.”
“It’s for the kids.”
“They’ll just find someone else to get it from.”
“We’ll be replaced by dispensers eventually, when they legalize this shit.”
“Fight the machines, fight the machines, fight the machines, fight the machines!”
You lurch forwards, chuckling. You give me a look of disbelief, your eyes glazed over with amphetamines. Weeks will pass by this way, neither of us will notice. I try to fascinate myself with something, but the high is threadbare. I’m clinging onto what’s left of it. C’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon. I clench my teeth, trying to tug it back to me. Do more good trying to wrangle a dragon. After three years you’ve got to truly earn your highs to still believe them. The body and brain become so desensitized; the apathy is palpable.
Speed makes you feel emotionally constipated. Sometimes I don’t know whether or not I should laugh or smile. I get up, to stretch and pace around. I’m languishing, your languishing. We walk by girls that haven’t learned how to afflict their sexuality on others. They’re as conductive as tree stumps. You hop to my gait and follow. I didn’t think you would, but it makes me happy that you are. These girls, these girls! They haven’t learned how to be sexy.
“They were better off like that,” he shrugs.
“Were they?”
I can’t remember. I’ve always sucked at love, even making it. You’ve got to be tactful. You have to know when to conserve and cutback. It’s never reliable enough. It’s not something you can put all your cards on. I never liked that; I’d rather lose it all on one bet.
I’ve seen older men go mad with love. They become utterly irrational, they have no control. It’s filthy. They do it all over nothing, too, so engrossed in their passions. You give me an earnest look, indicative that you’re coming down.
“Me too,” I need to snarl to say this, to unclench my teeth. I nod furiously after I say this. At least I don’t feel embarrassed jerking and twitching around you. I’m a goddamn fiend. I’d never hang out with someone high on speed. One second they love you, the next they’re busy plotting how to kill you. The rage is inconsolable and fleeting. I imagine I’m turning into a werewolf.
We walk around until we walk ourselves back to our car. We both get in, rolling up the window and locking the doors. The smell of my own body odor makes me want to vomit. I stuff a wad of gum into my mouth; a whole container of it. Tomorrow, will we come back and do this again?
And the next day?
I am an eye that is always exposed. There is nothing more naked than an eye. I pick apart an eye in my head. I try to put it back together. The pain drives me giddy. I need a beer.