The walls were larger, the space more open, the people more numerous. Still, that oppressive air lingered. Its touch a remnant from the days that had passed and yet still clung to my shoulders, like the backpack flung haphazardly over my back. It was within that tormenting air that they had found me, two girls asking if anyone was sitting in the seats of my booth.
“No,” I mumbled out, my lips stumbling over my tongue as a smile struggled to kindle.
Within that dimming cafeteria, where freshmen herded around the grill, pasta, and sushi lines, these two girls had slid into the seats beside me. Till this point, college had seemed no different from high school, where the world around teemed with life while I survived in the outskirts. Not a soul willing to venture into my domain. One of the girls was silent, her eyes entranced by her igniting phone just like most of Marist seemed to be. The other, a fashion major, asked me all about life before Marist.
The fashion major was greeted by a brick wall of misery as my lips censored the words I had wished to use for high school. Could they feel the hatred emanating from me as I flung aside their questions about the past? I had no desire to relive those years, let alone speak of them. High school was the worst thing in the world, and nobody could convince me otherwise. A place where they walked passed me in the halls, their fingers lining their wrists as they taught me “the proper way to cut.” A joke they would say, same as when they ripped chairs from underneath me or punched me in my manhood that they claimed I lacked. All just a joke I couldn’t understand. But as I sat across from these two lovely girls, I wished, pleaded with my brain to shut up and move to something happier.
It was all so familiar, and yet so different. High school’s grip is resting over my shoulder as I looked at these two women. High school-me would have run from the torment, waiting for the lunch monitors to disappear from the makeshift cafeteria so he could flee to the safety of the hallway. But there were no hallways anymore, nor were their people worth fleeing from. All there was were two lovely girls and a boy drowning in his own insecurities.
I craved for human interaction, and yet as these girls tried to break down my walls, I simply ran. We met three more times through the drudgery of academic life before she had forgotten the sullen boy from the cafeteria. She would have forgotten me, eventually. High school taught me that much; I just quickened the pace.
Such a small school, and yet the administration ran it with a tight fist. Everyone was forced along to their views of heaven and hell, and of matrimony. A hug was worth a suspension, a kiss probably expulsion. They talked about building leaders of the world but taught us not to think or breathe unless it was according to the word of God. Their God, not ours. Still, I escaped their rule by remaining forgotten, but is being forgotten preferable to being oppressed when even the teachers forgot you on the bus ride home in another state?
Despite what seemed inevitable, it is that first meeting in the cafeteria that I would rewrite if I could.
“Is anyone sitting here?”
“Nah,” I would say, smiling.
They would slide into the booth, and immediately I’d ask them how their semester was going. At that moment, I would shake off the weight of high school along with the laptop resting against my back. I would look at them and not at my food as I cut past the awkward clouds that hovered around me in every conversation. I would talk, and I would listen. Healing takes time, and at that moment, I was ready for nothing more than a passing ear. But if I could change it, I would be stronger than my pain. Conversations would flow from my lips as easily as they would enter my ears. I would have made friends. I would have been stronger. I was not.
Still, it seems as if I am not strong enough. Words froze on my tongue as fire blazed around me. People I know talk to others I know, but as I watch them, the past curdles around me. The long tape of past mistakes and insecurities collected since youth binding my rigid body. Even if I try to speak, what would be the point when the tape of my life is so easily forgotten, so easily fractured? Once more, I escape from the crowd, I do not need to wait for the lunch monitors to disappear for the walls are aimless, the space infinite, the people uncountable, and still that oppressive air lingers. The real story is not about two girls met in a cafeteria, but of a boy afraid of being forgotten.
