I'm sitting in a Brueggers on Wendesday morning with the very strange sense that not a mile down the road, my school has moved on without me. For those of you who don't know about Raleigh Charter, it's a bit different. Millbrook, or Sanderson are easy to lose yourself in. That is still possible in charter, but it takes doing, a conscious effort to dodge the debates, conversations and laughter in the hallways, to choose clothes nondescript enough every morning. Not black, as one gets noticed in all black. I never tried to lose myself, I never could. i was the one in the trench coat that was out of fashion 20 years ago, or the golden lamé cape, or the ridiculously loud rainbow button down and ripped jeans. I always felt that my school was a part of me, and I a part of it, and now it has moved on. This summer has been a steady march of inevitability, a slow yet impending, onrushing wave of change and choice and this morning at 9:06 that wave crashed right on top of my fuzzy, brown and slightly dimwitted head. I was at the intersection of Glenwood and Peace, excited about the recent removal of my braces and exploring my new shiny mouth with a clumsy tongue when i looked down at the clock on the dash which innocently told me that six minutes ago there was no more choice. I was going, leaving. I was already gone. The box of clothes was sent, the suitcase packed, the goodbye party held, the hugs given. All these things had already happened and I knew what they meant but the significance hadn't quite arrived. I'm now simply floating along, waiting with a potent dreamy cocktail of something that is in between terror and thrill. All these wet and dark things fell on my head at 9:06 this morning. I drove down, looped around the school but all I saw was an army of strange-faced volunteers and cars, blockading all the parking bays, as if to tell me "you made your choice, and you no longer belong here. you can't call this place yours anymore."
So here I sit. With a strange mouth full of bagel seeds, surrounded by a city, my city, that seems to be looking at me out of the corner of its small, gritty, scarred and yet still stunning eye as if it is uncomfortable with my presence but it, out of some lingering fondness wishes to keep me from knowing. My conversations with strangers are all blighted by the notion that soon they will be taken from me, that I will be a stranger in a strange town, full of strange people. Perhaps I already am, and it is only the ghosts of memories of erstwhile familiar places that pass in front of my eyes, I don't know.
All I do is that at 8:00 on the morning of Friday the Sixteenth of August, I won't be able to go home again. Even after I return I will have slowly transformed, subtly, without taking notice of myself, into a different Tom. Words will fall from my mouth, perhaps with more care, but with a different cadence. My friends... Perhaps I will return to a party, to cake and friends who felt the loss of a scatterbrained, loud, large and colorful boy acutely in their lives. Perhaps I will return to strangers with familiar faces but who have moved on, with little connection left to the one I will have become. Perhaps they will look at me and see a boy who was their friend, who they don't know is dead, left behind in a moment that passed without their notice. Perhaps they will still see this future Tom as me as I am now, but he will only see ghosts in their faces as they will have gone. They as he knows them will have died in a moment that he agonized over.
8:00, Friday the Sixteenth of August, 2013. It marches towards me with tiny boots that tick down with force unimagineable every second that passes. Small ticks that resonate with a solemn and curious announcement: "We shall see. You will know yourself." Tick. Tick. Tick. We. Shall. See.
So here I sit. With a strange mouth full of bagel seeds, surrounded by a city, my city, that seems to be looking at me out of the corner of its small, gritty, scarred and yet still stunning eye as if it is uncomfortable with my presence but it, out of some lingering fondness wishes to keep me from knowing. My conversations with strangers are all blighted by the notion that soon they will be taken from me, that I will be a stranger in a strange town, full of strange people. Perhaps I already am, and it is only the ghosts of memories of erstwhile familiar places that pass in front of my eyes, I don't know.
All I do is that at 8:00 on the morning of Friday the Sixteenth of August, I won't be able to go home again. Even after I return I will have slowly transformed, subtly, without taking notice of myself, into a different Tom. Words will fall from my mouth, perhaps with more care, but with a different cadence. My friends... Perhaps I will return to a party, to cake and friends who felt the loss of a scatterbrained, loud, large and colorful boy acutely in their lives. Perhaps I will return to strangers with familiar faces but who have moved on, with little connection left to the one I will have become. Perhaps they will look at me and see a boy who was their friend, who they don't know is dead, left behind in a moment that passed without their notice. Perhaps they will still see this future Tom as me as I am now, but he will only see ghosts in their faces as they will have gone. They as he knows them will have died in a moment that he agonized over.
8:00, Friday the Sixteenth of August, 2013. It marches towards me with tiny boots that tick down with force unimagineable every second that passes. Small ticks that resonate with a solemn and curious announcement: "We shall see. You will know yourself." Tick. Tick. Tick. We. Shall. See.
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