Postgraduate Grotesque, Part 3
On my knees, I slumped over the box of white papers, none of them containing the tickets that I needed, that my family needed to see me graduate. All I could think of was all the criticisms my mother had thrown at me throughout my life, how immature and irresponsible I was. I thought about how I tried to live opposed to my mother’s opinions of me. I was responsible when I needed to be. I was mature. I lived almost independently for three years. I can take care of myself. I was responsible.
But apparently I can’t. Apparently I wasn’t.
Mom was right. I am irresponsible. I can’t keep up with the things that I need to. I suck at life. Tears welled up against my will and spilled on the white papers. Mom walked in and saw me on the floor with my hands pulling at my hair in frustration.
“Bran,” her voice dropping with each word, “You can’t find them, can you?”
I then spewed the situation to her in an incoherent burst. How could this be happening? How could I have let this happen to myself? How is it that I’ve messed up so badly? Mom told me to settle myself down ‘cause the sight of me upset was going to make her upset. She got on the floor with me and we went through all of my papers once again, incredibly carefully, piece by piece, hoping against hope that the tickets would magically maneuver themselves out from underneath wherever they might have slipped into.
Through blurry eyes, I went through the papers, knowing they weren’t there. I must have thrown them away along with those sliced up papers from the day before. They just weren’t there.
“It’ll be OK,” Mom said through a filter of feigned assurance. I could hear the grit in her voice. Of course she was mad. Heck, I’d be mad at me if I was my kid. That was the whole point of them coming down, to watch me walk and now they can’t because of my major mess up. Mom had to endure Dad’s angry withdrawals and Grandmother’s shining senility to get to this point and it was looking like it was all for naught.
Then I heard a voice booming from the other room.
“I’m back,” declared Beau.
Oh, fabulous. I definitely didn’t want him to see me looking all cry faced. I then heard Grandmother talking to him. Maybe she’d keep him busy until I could get myself together again. I apologized profusely and Mom just exhaled. She told me again to calm down and that it would all be OK and that we needed to finish with all the packing. I told her to give me a minute and she left the room.
I stayed crouched on the floor for a while, just letting the tears and sadness and frustration wash over me before I tried to contain it. It wasn’t just the tickets. It was everything. It was all the anger and disappointment that had been pent up since my last infrequent cry. My emotions don’t have many places to go so when they found an outlet they take advantage of it, whether I like it or not. After I calmed down a bit, I dashed to the bathroom and splashed some cold water on my face.
I looked in the mirror and watched as the water rolled down my face, my eyes red and swollen. Idiot. Stupid. Reckless. This incident definitely wasn’t going to help my self-hatred. After a few minutes of washing the water over my face, I dried my skin and dashed back to my room. I grabbed my chair and tried to disassemble it.
“Did you hear that, Bran?” Mom called from the other room.
“No,” I replied.
She walked in and said she asked Beau about the tickets and he said he had enough extra tickets to cover my family for the 1:00 ceremony and we only needed one more for the one in the morning.
“So, see, everything’s alright,” she said, once again in her fake reassuring voice. She was still aggravated. Not as much as I was.
“Well, we still don’t have enough tickets for the one in the morning.”
“It’s not as important as the one in the afternoon, though.”
I grabbed my cell phone and texted Steve to see if he had an extra ticket for in the morning.
Mom left the room again and Beau showed up a little while later. Awesome. I kept my head down, pretending to remove the seat of the chair from the legs, so that he wouldn’t see my tear stained face.
“Did your mom tell you I got some extra tickets?”
“Yes, thank you so much,” I said in a dry, insincere voice. I mean, I was sincere, incredibly grateful that he was able to come up with the tickets between him and his girlfriend in such a short period of time but I was still just so upset with myself that I couldn’t bring myself to muster anything other than grizzle through my gullet.
“You’re welcome. I’m gonna go and get them now.”
I sat on my bed, hating myself, hating the fact that although some extra tickets had come through, I still had to go through such drama. Sitting there, full of self-loathing, my eyes locked onto a previously unexplored box as soon as my mom walked in again.
“Oh, wait a minute!” I semi-shouted as I lunged for the box. I opened the flap and recognized all the papers that I had tucked my tickets into. I scrambled through the first several pages and pushed them out of the way until I found it. I stood up and held up the envelope containing the tickets. A huge weight lifted from my shoulders. Mom didn’t seem to be as relieved as I was.
“Give them to me, give them to me now,” she said sternly as she snatched the tickets from my hand. “I’m gonna go put these in my purse right now before they get lost again.”
Well, they were never really lost. I just forgot where I placed them and happened to miss the box they were in because the box was tucked away almost underneath my bed. I think Mom wasn’t so much upset that the tickets were misplaced as she was angry that I put her through all that. I wasn’t exactly thrilled that things had to go down that way either but at least everything worked out, right? Nevertheless, I was still pretty mad at myself for being so brainless and pretty aggravated that I even had to go through such a stressful situation so unnecessarily.
I immediately got on the phone with Beau and told him that I didn’t need those extra tickets after all, so he didn’t have to go to any more trouble than he already had. He said he already had the tickets and would bring them over just in case. Probably a good idea. Just then Steve texted me and said he did have an extra ticket for the morning. Either way I was covered but I was incredibly glad that I still had my tickets, as if somehow that made the situation less crappy than it was.
I was feeling a lot better, not just that tickets were available to my family, but that I hadn’t actually lost them. But when you are feeling that emotional, it’s not so easy to come down from such a depression. Plus, even though I hadn’t lost the tickets, I still didn’t know where they were. I should have kept better track of them and that fact kept me from feeling completely better. I was still irresponsible.
As we packed up box after box and took them to my car, I asked Mom every five minutes if she had the tickets. Even as she was walking out the door for the night, I asked her about the whereabouts of the tickets. She told me they were safely tucked away inside of her purse. Good. Good.
I went to bed in my semi-naked room and had a bit of trouble getting to sleep, despite the previous ticket trauma. Have you ever felt uncomfortable in your room when you knew things were out of place? Is it just me or does it mess you up too when things aren’t how they usually are? Not only that but I was also frustrated with how things went down with the tickets, and even earlier with me and my family squabble. Things were just not working out how I had hoped. It wasn’t the great, fun visit from my family that I was hoping for. But then again, it was SCAD. What had worked out like I wanted? Nothing, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that there’d be one final freak out associated with this school. I was being foolish into thinking that since I was done with classes, I’d be done with any negativity that had to do with this place. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
With only four hours until I had get up and get dressed for graduation, I finally sank into sleep. The morning light would usher in the big day. I just prayed I wouldn’t run headfirst into any more hurdles on the way to getting my diploma.