I digress; it was nearing the end of Grade 11 and I was starting to feel distanced from my friends. Maybe it was a introverted temperament setting in or the fact that I wasn't build for the constant swapping of barbed quips. You know, jockeying for position as young men tend to do. I found it tiring, and right at the end of the year I remember them roaring with laughter after tricking me into drinking something technically (although not effectively) containing alcohol. Ah, to be a young Mormon in a small town. Your church teaches you not to have friends outside outside of the congregation. And pity on those who are lonesome even inside their faith. You try to keep your head and morals up, only to make you a lonesome, easy target in secular social circles. Like the weakest member of the flock.
I took offense. Well, not really. I was just hurt. I thought these guys were my friends, and here they were having a grand, Machiavellian chortle at my expense. Ah, the lowest rung on the ladder. Why did I ever forsake thee? Something snapped inside and it was time to hop off the ladder entirely.
I coasted through the last couple weeks, and off to summer break we went. I managed to get another season's worth of work at the local mini golf course. In my fervor of working and picking up extra shifts where I could (you gotta get money for the Palm Pilot somehow!), I didn't really touch base with anyone. My brother went away to work for a relative, so I'd spend my free time playing the original Call of Duty. I beat it through twice in a row, if I recall correctly.
When I set foot back in school that September, I was immediately overwhelmed. Not by anyone, but just by everything washing over me. Dealing with mobs of angry American tourists was easy, but for some reason the throngs of high school students were a step too far. Some of which were supposed to be friends I no longer had the capacity to maintain relationships with.
I didn't realize it at the time, but that summer seemed to be an easy weightlessness of freefall, one sunny day after another. 9.8m/s2 of acceleration for 60 consecutive, oblivious days. The school's front doors, I suppose, provided the surface that I'd inevitably shatter against.
A 16-hours-of-sleep-a-day style of broken works like this: Get up early for an hour of seminary (bible study), grab something to eat, go to school. Keep your head down and shamble around like your insides aren't full of glass. Get home around 3pm, eat a snack, go to sleep. Some time around 7 or 8pm your body says, "Whelp, I'm rested!". Instead of getting up, you persevere through the rest of your night because your mind just can't hack reality.
I think this went on for about two weeks. No one really intervened because teenagers are gonna teenage. Eventually I realized that I couldn't keep going, so I gutted my course load like a rotten fish; not looking too closely at what you're doing, just waving a knife around until you can hear entrails slapping against the floor. I cut Math and Band. Traded one for work experience where I knew I could be alone doing menial computer maintenance for the elementary school, and traded the other for a spare/open block. This left me with the bare minimum credits to graduate. Meanwhile, the IT prof let me 'claim' a workstation for myself in the second computer lab, so even though I was taking Graphic Design, I was allowed to be in a room on my own with my head down while getting the work done. To round it off I purchased a pair of collapsible JBL headphones to compliment my trusty MP3 CD player. I drowned out the rest of the world in musical morphine wherever the opportunity arose.
Math was an easy cut. I knew I could drag myself along through sheer force of will, but the subject matter had become so abstract that nothing was coming intuitively. One of my former friends told me, "I won't just let you give up like that." and then proceeded to do nothing. The math prof stopped me after handing back the textbook to remark that he wasn't sure what university I'd be able to get into without the course. Internally I was wondering what the absolute fuck would I go to university for. A meaningful choice of career continued to elude me and caused me no lack of anxiety, thanks to a lifetime of watching my folks struggle financially.
Band was a harder loss; it was consistently one of my favourite courses in secondary school. Alas, this year I was lumped in with a small class that consisted of people I didn't know plus a few impressively obnoxious individuals that I couldn't stand. Where was the fun in playing music with people that didn't bother to follow along? I kept attending jazz band after school, though I think I hurt the band prof by ditching the main course. He was a really good dude.
Herein lays the reason for this whole jaunt down adolescent nightmare's lane. I still have dreams about missing out on band that year and how I disappointed good ol' Mr. G after he had nurtured me to be one of his better players. The dreams change, but the familiar themes of regret linger. Dare I say, Grade 10 Band was the highlight of my highschool days, so this was quite the fall in a short time span. Sometimes I dream I was too careless to enroll, others I sign up but there's no class, or there's no trusty Jazz Band and I'm destined to spend the year musicless.
And thus I scraped by my final year of high school. I never spoke with anyone or set foot in the 'Senior's Lounge' where only the Grade 12 kids could hang out. I was about as isolated as I could possibly get and as hopelessly lost as someone who had discarded themselves could be. Had I not been such a coward I would've attempted, intentionally, to do something terminally stupid. I thought about it a lot. Those were bleak days where I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. I was woefully lonely, so I self medicated with isolation and writing shitty journal entries while listening to Linkin Park.
Looking back, I feel really sorry for the kid I used to be. Goddamn, he really could've used an actual friend or someone more involved in his life. Someone to shake him a lil' by the shoulders and maybe across the face when he needed it. But mainly someone to just actively listen to him rant and rave and process all those polluted teenage emotions with.
My folks, to their credit, were over their heads with other stuff at the time. Church was a joke and succeeded in poisoning any fertile soil where self esteem could grow. School was just... too much. That left me with gaming, I suppose. I had found a Counter-Strike group to play with. And while I didn't get the emotional support I really needed, the structure and community gave me a space to exist outside of my current hellhole. I knew what to expect, and no one made fun of my skin or religion.
Of course violence = bad, and thanks to one CBC video segment on Al Qaida skins, I remember my folks remarking, "Counter-Strike? Isn't that the game you play? It looks AWFUL!" And just like that, I wasn't allowed to play any more. This little domestic policy was eventually walked back, but the 'no internet or chat in the bedroom' rule stayed in place. Because Christian reasons, naturally. It ultimately meant that, when it was time to scrim, I had to run upstairs to co-ordinate and get server IPs on the family machine, then run downstairs and try to connect, and then bounce between at any instance where actual communication or planning was involved. Looking back... what I joke that was. For the record, I was okay at pubbing but garbage at competitive. But I was mostly there just to be around familiar faces screen names that didn't hassle me. That got me through the year.
The end of Grade 12 rolled around, and at the award ceremony Mr G asked all his senior band students to come up. You see, back in Grade 7 we were the first group that he taught, and now here we were graduating. He'd been with us each year. He gave everyone a little statuette or something, but he didn't have anything for me, because I was no longer in Band Proper. That one hurt a bit. It's not hard to see why when you put yourself in his shoes, though. Outside of my hazy cranium there was no good reason for me to drop his class like I did.
I didn't want to go to the graduation ceremony. The last year had been utter hell for me and I was still broken and exhausted, emotionally unable to process the act of celebrating the culmination of my misery. My parents said I didn't have to go... but it sure would mean a lot to them if I went. So I did, and I wore my CS jersey, because that was the only damn thing in my life that I felt I could be proud of. I was a shit player, but I was glad to be a part of that group. My mom would chide me for a few years afterwards whenever she saw me wearing it again. "Oh, breaking out THE TUXEDO are we?!" Har har. It wasn't a tuxedo, to that lost and frustrated kid it was a goddamn suit of armour that helped keep his scrambled insides upright. I remember finishing the grad ceremony, meeting up with my folks, and begging to leave. I was so spent. They refused, and said we needed to hang out more.
They applied some (soft) guilt to get me to go. Okay, fine. But not letting me go home at that point just hurt. I didn't go to the reception or after party, I just walked aimlessly around town until 1AM because I didn't feel like I had anywhere to be. I still feel kind of bad about going, because it was genuinely inauthentic way to recognize just how bad my senior years of highschool were.
All of this is just as, if not more, angsty than it sounds. That's who I was and that's all I had, and I wish it would've/could've gone a different way. I've been pretty diligent in covering up those memories, because I lot of what I did was incredibly cringey and the residual feelings dark and sticky. But I just didn't have the support or resources to do anything else with what I felt. It was really unhealthy. So, 17/18 year old Chris, I see you. You desperately needed help and a guiding hand that never came when and how you needed it. That year was shit, but you did the best with what you had. And now you're twice as old and half a continent away with your feet up. Things do get better.
The band class dreams don't need a passport to follow along, though. It's almost comical how something so trivial creates a notch for your subconscious to stub its toe on. It obviously meant a lot to the kid I was then and the man I am now. I miss playing my sax in a group. Maybe there's some community band I can join. Some day.
But if that's the biggest anguish to haunt me from my youth, then I think I've done alright. We got there, buddy. We're out of that mess and went far away to better shores. Regrets may collect like old friends, but fuck Facebook. Some things can be left behind.
-Cril
No one I think is in my tree
I mean, it must be high or low
That is, you can't, you know, tune in but it's all right
That is, I think it's not too bad
Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever
Richie Havens - Strawberry Fields Forever
