Pathetic

It was one of those rare days when it actually got colder as the day wore on. I left my home near sea level and ascended into the dense fog that they call school. Sometimes when you're secure in that concrete prison it's possible to forget that you're actually inside a cloud.

It's like the kingdom of Heaven only different, filled with fog and dying leaves, pot smoke and apathetic kids who can't really afford their tuition but are somehow there anyway. There used to be strikes here, protests, demonstrations and activism, however shortsighted, overidealistic or ineffectual they may have been. There used to be a pulse here, but pressing my fingers against the walls of the establishment, I feel nothing. It's cold.

All dead things go to heaven, or so they say. My heaven's got ivory towers and hungry people and one hell of a suicide stigma. We sit with our laptops in the pub, the hallways, the overcrowded laptop labs. Over coffee I'll tell you I can't focus on anything, that I can't seem to think this semester. As we look out the window, Rob says that the scenery is an adequate depiction of the contents of his mind: vague, nebulous and monochrome.

I feel the same way too. Evidently it isn't just the wireless that permeates our brains. I wish he'd get his coffee maker to work. I wish he'd stop saying "um" all the time. I wish for a lot of things. I know I shouldn't wish away my life, but I don't see the harm in it today. After all, tomorrow will be another day, regardless.

These are the days when I sit down and evaluate things, when I realize once again that as much as I try to fight it, my life is still on hold. After eleven months I'm still living out of boxes. I still feel like a refugee in my own home. I begin to think that I've spent too long out here, in this shithole suburb in the middle of nowhere, with its wonderbread, white trash people. I know I shouldn't be so prejudiced, because in spite of everything, I too am just a working-class fuck like everyone else.

But the fact remains that I have no desire to stay here. No matter how much I unpack, how many old things I throw away, I can never make this mine. It's only a matter of time until I leave, in one way or another, and the waiting is killing me.

For lack of anything better to do, I find my fingers dialling what seem like random numbers on my phone. "You sound bored," he says from the other end of the line. Fuck, is it that obvious? He's such a nice person and yet I can't stand him. I don't know why I called in the first place.