The Lost

Upon losing my car, I have been left to walk both to and from the school and to spend most of the day within the confines of the Green Room or the resource room where I do my homework and stare at the computer screen listlessly as my eyes burn themselves out of my skull. Tonight I’ve had the privilege of not needing to worry about ‘Cabaret’ rehearsal and also the problem of having to worry excessively about ‘Rats,’ as the cast seems to be ever-willing to drive me to madness. But this is not what I wanted to talk about. Already I digress:

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Every night upon my walk home I feel exhausted. My eyes do not wish to stay open and often enough, I have to fight to keep them from closing. My entire body sags and I walk almost with a limp as my former posture, which is only controlled through concentration, sags away. Yet I push on.

My path is not the easiest one. I do not follow the sidewalk but rather I avoid the lights and travel down the nature path, across the bridge where the river runs below, gurgling soothingly. Sometimes I feel like just laying down in the water there and passing out forever. Instead I walk across the bridge and move on through the barely lit darkness.

The trees loom up on both sides as I turn my back on the auditorium that sits outside in nature’s shelter. It is beautiful in the day and in the night…a symbol of what exactly man can create when he works together with nature and doesn’t just try to conquer it. Through the woods I wander, moving along the path, passing the benches placed in such a way that at one time they must have looked out at something, now they stare at trees but two inches away from themselves. Perhaps it is symbolic in its way.

The stars are bright above and I always seem drawn to the star that sits right next to the moon, the bright one that seems to stand on its own and fight the moon for my attention when I stare into the sky and often enough, it wins. For the moon is but a rock, and a star seems more an ideal to me.

I emerge upon the road and walk through the street, straight down the center as if it was built for me and then I move along past the Yeager’s apartment. Sometimes I go up, but not often. Instead I cut through the fence areas and walk through the grass just along the wall, hidden in the shadow so that the apartment dwellers don’t see me. And then I emerge on Main Street and follow the sidewalk down to my apartment.

Cars pass me constantly, their bright headlights in my eyes, moving past me like shooting stars. The sound of their speed passes me by and for the first time in a long time I listen to the world around me as it exists. Everything is but an affect of something else in the end. The car’s sound is not made by it, neither is the wind….for we don’t hear wind, we hear what the wind hits and shakes. The lights I see are already gone and are moving faster and past me…..all just affects of something else.

But it’s not until the last turn, when I cross the crosswalk onto West Johnson street and I wander through the great neon white of Dick’s Plus that I begin to think…..think deeply now. No more noticing the stars and the grass and the trees and the people and the cars. No more realization of what is around me. Now I step into the past…..and become a pastoralist in my own way for many a moment. I do not consider myself a pastoralist in most fashions, as the past haunts me more as a demon than an angel….and for this I curse its very existence….and yet I look back on it so often, one would think that it meant everything to me.

And in a way it has. I have lost something profound and I’m trying to understand exactly what it is. It is an abstract thing, some emotion that has not yet been named because it is too complex for us to waste out time with naming. Instead we define it in terms of other terms and pray that that will be enough, but it isn’t and it never will be for me.