Not Much of a Title

Not Much of a Title

1

Sometimes all the lies I’m always telling myself seem more realistic than the truth I’m always trying to hide. I make myself believe that the only thing missing from a functional new life is a queen-sized comforter with corduroy fabric, or a luxury sedan, or a sweet little chime to hang up outside the window that jingles whenever the air catches it. Wouldn’t that be so darling? To think that those small, little worldly possessions are all that’s left before I can be fulfilled. I could keep fooling myself. I could make all my dreams of a happy, quaint little life come true, and live in blissful ignorance.
My life had so much wasted opportunity.
I’m riding my rusty, old bicycle down Country road towards my childhood home, just twelve miles away from the beginning of a new life. My fresh start. I call my bike the ‘Lean, Mean, Green Machine,’ even though it’s hardly green; more of a red if you asked me. My colorblind brother may have thought it was green, but he also liked rolling around through the grassy red meadows in his free time. He made up that name for my bike, and insisted that I call it that. Colorblindness is a result of a defect in the cone receptors in the retina of the eye, and my brother refused to believe he was defective. Red is green, yellow is blue, my brother is defective.
If I can remember correctly, home is between a depleted gasoline station, and a dumpy factory. The lost remnants of a vigorous era of industrialization. As a child, it was always fun playing hide-and-seek with my friends in the factory mill. We were all so young, and what could be more fun at that age than running around a dusty, old factory cutting ourselves on loose nails, catching tetanus, and eventually dying a long, painful death? What could be more entertaining than losing all our little fingers in a freak accident, when the conveyor belt magically switched on? Shattered glass, exposed wires, faulty equipment. Burnt hairless, massive fires, a torn ligament. We wanted danger and we needed disaster.
How can you grow if you never experience tragedy?
The gasoline station was a breeding ground for disease. A resource for viral infection. Sucked dry of all it’s oil, it became our tree house. When we ran out of ways to destroy ourselves in the factory, the gas station became our relief from safety. We weren’t exactly self-destructive, and it wasn’t like we found pleasure in pain. Our generation hadn’t ever experienced war and we thought it was about time we tasted agony. Whether we survived our youth and grew into functional adults, or met our doom at our prime was God’s will.
Let fate take it’s course.
As I slowly make my way back to my past, peddling at a steady pace with my hair taking advantage of an opportunity to liberate itself in the afternoon breeze, I eagerly await my chance to start over again from the beginning. This black asphalt of road that my wheels press against acts as a timeline. An endless patch of concrete connecting my childhood to my adult life, where each mile between the two points of time represents a month that I’ve been gone. I haven’t seen my parents in over ten years. The worst ten agonizing years of my life, which the old factory disasters couldn’t compare to. Most people have their parents to cry to when they lose their job, or crash their luxury sedan, or even lose their house in the fiery flames. They have that support, emotionally and financially; that boost of encouragement that says ‘Hey, it’s not the end of the world. You still have us. You still have hope.’ What happened to my hope? What is keeping me emotionally stable after I wake up on the streets with no money, no clothes, no identity?
I carelessly throw my cigarette butt into the crop fields still lit, and take out another one from the pack I bummed off of some bum. One small, little piece of tobacco, paper, and burning ash could cause a massive fire that obliterates a farming families crop field, their financial investment. Leaving them shit out of luck, and their kids hungry, but if they are good parents they’ll say, ‘ It’s not the end of the world. We still have hope. We still have each other.’ Couldn’t we all be as lucky?
How can you grow if you never experience disaster?
Every mile closer I get to home, the butterflies in my stomach flutter more rampantly. My mother always told me that it is butterflies in your stomach that give you that gut-tickling feeling when you are nervous, and it is frogs in your throat that make you talk raspy when you are sick. I think she said it to comfort me, but it always made me more worried thinking I had butterflies and frogs playing around in me.
My heart jumps when I first lay eyes on my old country home. The factory mill and gasoline station were torn down, probably after one too many children met their doom falling over the railing of the rotten, wooden steps. The steps that were held together by tetanus-infected nails, that cut the wires, exposing them, and magically switching on the conveyor belt that stole two fingers from my left hand. I like to think I got out easy though. I don’t remember my house looking as beautiful with all the sprouting impatience, blooming roses, and ripening tomatoes. I don’t remember the freshly coated white painting on all the shudders, the sturdy front steps, and the elegant tin mailbox only three feet away from the front door that opens to a second chance. But most of all, I don’t remember being greeted with a shotgun to my nose and a bullet in my skull. I guess some people don’t get the second chance they were hoping for.
Where is my emotional support when I get shot point-blank in between my eyes with a 32-calliber rifle? Where is my hope? And who’s going to tell me that this isn’t the end of the world? My world.
Most people are hoping for some great motion picture where your life flashes before your eyes right before you die. It’s not as magical as you might think. In fact, most of the memories are blurry and don’t make much sense to you when you have a horrible pain flowing through your body. It’s more like getting a front row seat to a shitty horror movie that you want to sleep through any ways, but you feel like you paid for it, so you might as well see if it gets good. So I’ll make my screenplay as short and painless as possible. You’ll have your time to sleep later.