I'm walking, shakily, on the railroad tracks that run through Walla Walla. It's a therapeutic sort of thing, something I did as a kid whenever life got to be too much. I just jutted my head downward, and stared at the ruddy brown of the iron rails until everything was gone and I wasn't seeing, I was only moving. I'm trying to get back to that place, to feel that soft, comforting throbbing on my forehead, right above my eyes, but I think my brain is just holding in too many thoughts and voices and questions and fears and hopes to settle down, empty itself, be that little eight year-old mind again.
I want the most difficult question of the day to be chocolate or vanilla ice cream, David? I want that to be the reason I'm visiting the tracks this evening.
Instead, I realize it's rising through my body again, surging towards my brain; I try to force it down, but it's a futile attempt and I succumb to the question. David, do you have courage?
Yes, I do.
No, I don't.
Circle one.
Get off the rails.
Go finish physics.
I'm angry that I can't produce the right answer, but I'm even angrier because I know why. Semester after semester, I stay at a place I don't want to be, go through the academic and social motions even though I think that's seriously fucked up, and act like all this stuff means as much to me as it does to my friends and teachers and classmates. Which is a lie.
The birth of David. I can see, faintly, the doctors, the nurses, my parents, their friends gathered around my red, wet head, already pounding into my brain that boys like me, boys who have wealthy, well-educated, liberal parents, who have unimaginable privilege, who have twelve years of intensive preparatory school ahead of them, are to go to college. It's the only thing a person with that kind of position in the world can and should rightfully do. That idea festered and grew inside my head crowding out those few and far between voices that told me life without college can be good; not everyone turns to meth and has too many kids and can't speak no propah inglish and dies a lonely bastard.
I met Molly when I was sixteen. My father told me that I needed to get a summer job, to learn the strife of the working class, to understand how good I had it, so I biked east from the house, up the one sloping hill in the city, and went into the café at the top. I told the owner I would like a job please, sir, and he tossed me an apron, said come back tomorrow at nine sharp and don't be late, young man. I was there at 8:55. I spent the morning clearing tables, smiling at customers, wearing my oversized apron, and staining it, staining it, staining it, until the man who hired me told me to go in back and get some lunch from Molly, son. Who's Molly? I pondered this as I pushed the kitchen doors open, looking around and taking in air tinted with the smell of both the yeasty bread loaves rising on the table and the rotting food scraps lying in the garbage next to the dishwasher.
"David?" I turned towards the voice.
"I'm David," I said.
"I'm Molly." She was in her mid-thirties, aged in her face, but possessing the body of an awkward teenage girl, except she wasn't awkward, not at all; she was smiling easily. She put a sandwich on the counter before me and as I ate ravenously she asked me about school and sports and music and my first day as a working boy. With surprising ease I told her about everything; each day after that I told her about everything. She worked from 4 am until 2 pm so I caught her at the end of her shift, when she was most honest. She hadn't gone to college, or traveled Eurasia, or done anything that by the standards of my world outside the realm of the café would have been especially noteworthy. Yet she was intelligent in a way I'd never seen before, plodding, unrushed, compelled to prove her right to exist and matter to no one.
I started to come before work to talk with her, each week earlier and earlier, riding my bike toward the eastern sun, seeing a smaller sliver of it every day until when I got to the top of the hill one August morning, I was looking down on it and it rose to meet me.
Then school started and the next summer I figured I'd be back with Molly just like before, but my parents insisted I get an internship and volunteer at an old folks' home in order to bolster my college application.
And I did it.
I have no courage.
So here I am, ignoring what I've known for five years -- that college just isn't for me -- fully aware that as I write my fifteen page paper, I don't give a shit; I am wasting my life, but my fingers continue to type it, type it, type it. I just can't escape the pounding voices in my head that tell me how college is the only way to be legitimate, successful. Happy.
I am so fucking scared. I don't want to loose my house or my stuff or my friends or my family, but I'd like to feel free, feel the pressure in my head subside, feel what it's like to live honestly.
I'd like to watch that sun rise again.
The light is morphing the tracks from ruddy brown to copper red, making them glow brightly, too brightly, so I look up and there is the sun, setting, slipping below me, and in one swift motion I jump from the track.
Life beckons.