Enlisting

There was something wrong last night; there had to be. AW was so distant, his usual loquaciousness directed at everyone but myself, the absence of his words and attention leaving a ragged emptiness and hurt such that, during my long, long run, cruelty and self-righteous fury would intrude on and punctuate my arrogant self-sufficiency. I avoided his gaze or he avoided mine. I stood, waiting to be addressed, not daring to address, in an uncomfortable proximity, hungry like a dog for breadcrumbs of affection, finally concluding that I needed no one. No man is an island but I. I am an island.

The corpse of an idea revived itself--I would enlist. Beneath the incessent salvo of commands, the ordering and re-ordering of my life by an external entity greater and nobler than I, the island, could ever be, I would find some semblence of happiness. I would earn financial self-sufficiency.

That was the insanity, the uncertainty, the depression of an otherwise pleasant day. It was suicide Tuesday, the morning after, buyer's remorse, all bundled up with a bit of ribbon on top.

I sat in the public library, light streaming in from the windows high above, head bowed over my future in the shape of a test prep book. The librarian had paused, had asked with a quizzical bend of the brows, "How do you spell that?"

"A-S-V-A-B. The ASVAB? It came up when I searched in the library catalog...I just don't know where to find it."

"Ah, then we have it. It would be here," he was so kind as to walk me to them, even though they were just behind me, a bit to the right, in the Exam Prep books section, the various futures squeezed together onto a few shelves and organized by that greatest equalizer--the alphabet, with issues of class, status, potential income utterly beside the point. When the future is beyond reach, a mere dream for which one must study and think and question, labor and sweat and bleed; when a book represents that future, it need not be ranked, it need not be differentially valued--it does not exist.

My future does not exist.