Mad World

To be honest, this really doesn’t concern him. This isn’t about him, it’s simply the story around him. Everything that essentially makes up him, but not him himself. All the people in his life, his parents per say, but not him.

He’s like the back up actor in his own life. He doesn’t even get to play a role, he just gets to sit back and wait for all the lead characters to get sick or hurt. He’s just going to wait until the lead gets some incurable disease, or breaks his ankle, or slides off the side of the highway that leads to nowhere. He’ll just wait until it’s his turn to play the lead, until he’s the star, until he can put on a show.

He doesn’t have a name, really. Or it doesn’t matter. He can’t remember whether or not he has one or if it was just so forgettable that he himself forgot. No one knows him, but his parents who, quite frankly, disregard him most of the time and dismiss his plentiful tears.

Poor kid.

Maybe someday everyone will know him. Someday he will get cast as the lead role. Imagine that, he will have the lead role in his life. What a world he lives in, where he doesn’t have control in his own life. He can’t decide when he goes left or when he goes right. But someday he will gain control over himself. Until then he will just be waiting under the covers waiting for his own life to begin.

Outside the window by his bed, rain is falling. It pitter-patters on the rooftop and trails down the fogged glass. He’s up and out of bed. The covers to his bed are around his shoulders and the hem traipses along the floor. He rests his elbows on the wooden ledge beneath the window. The moon is full and it illuminates the entire scene. It casts a eerie glow across his gingerbread eyes and his candy lips. He blinks.

The rain is dripping off the shutters. The rain is seeping in through the cracks of the window pane. Water pools about his elbows and spills onto the floor boards. The tired rain water glides between the cracks and crevices of the wooden bedroom floor. He blinks. His tears slide down his own fogged cheeks. His tears drip down to the floor boards and slide in between the cracks.

Somewhere on the level below, his mother is setting up an bucket to catch all the rain water dripping from the ceiling.

His mother is the one who steers his life with an iron grip. She forced him away. She forced him away from sunny swing set days and lazy, sunset evenings. She forced him away from someplace he used to call home. She forced him away from comfort and love. She forced him into a wooden box miles away from swing set Saturdays and pin pricked night skies. He can only see the moon through rain streaked eyes. His stained eyes can only dream as far as home can take him.

For future reference, home is nothing but artificial, gentle captivity and dreaming of it only makes your heart hurt.

On bed, on top of the bleached, starched white sheets like those found in hospitals beds, lies a deflated school back. The books and notepads are strewn across the floor. Pencils and markers are all about, lying like wounded animals on the sides of highways that take you nowhere. Towering above the scene, like mute skyscrapers, are the empty bookshelves. They lean in towards the room like an old woman interested in conversation.

Somewhere downstairs the boy’s mother is trying to figure out how a leak got into the ceiling of her brand new house. She calls her husband on his cell phone. He answers, miles away at his work, and he tells her put a pail underneath the leak and he’ll look into it in the morning. She’s already set up her son’s old pail that he used to play with in the sandbox underneath the water. It’ll work ‘till morning she figures.

Rain water is ruining his pajamas, but it’s not like he cares. He’s far too nervous to care. His mother is forcing him to go to school tomorrow. All the brand new notepads and folders and unsharpened pencils and erasers, they all lay like victims of some horrid crime below his bed. He’s far too nervous to care. He’s far too nervous to care whether or not his mother comes in and sees his tears.

It’s not like she’d care anyway.

He looks out at the moon, the way it fills up the entire sky almost. It demands your attention. Someday he will be the moon out there, demanding your attention. Someday he will be put out on stage and sing songs about love and sorrow. Someday he will dance for your attention. Someday it will be just him and his life and his story.

Someday better come soon, he figures. He doesn’t want to wait in the back seat for too long.

Morning comes with unforgiving sunlit wishes. All his hopes and wishes, dusted and set out for display on the empty bookshelves are crushed by the arrival of morning and the threatening power of his mother’s force. He’ll go to school whether he likes it or not. She doesn’t care if he cries. He should be grateful for the national school system. She didn’t have to go school in her days. No, people barely graduated high school.

He’s going to school. He knows he’ll be told to sit and shut up. Sit. Shut up. Learn. Listen. He will be cast behind the shadows of other’s lime lights. He will be told to play back up. To wait for the lead to get sick or hurt.

His mother drives him to school in her old station wagon that spurts and stutters. She kisses him on the top of his head through the car window and tells him to get going. Rain pitter-patters on top of his head. His hair melts to the side of his face. All his new notebooks and folders get damp and smell like mildew now.

Chairs and desks, joined at the hip, are lined up on rows in the class room. Children bustle about like bees in a hive. They go this way and that way. They make him feel worse. He sits at his desk. Alone and wet. His school books smell like mold. He wants to leak into the floor, like the rain dripping from his clothes. He knows some of the children. All the children who are too busy bustling around to remember.

They forgot last year, miles away, too. His mother forgot again this year.

The teacher raps on the board. Attention children, sit and listen. Sit. Shut up. Learn. Listen. He’s just a back up actor waiting for his turn to sing. And dance. And act. And demand your attention. Someday, he will do it. Someday, he will get lead role in his life.

When he’s famous and he’s up on stage towering over them, laced in lime light, they will remember his birthday. It will be a national holiday. And no one forgets national holidays. Someday, no one will forget him and he will rule his life.

Until then, Happy Birthday kid. Happy Birthday.