Entry Fifteen

The first installment of "Bus Stories". I haven;t decided if I want to change the title. I think it works and it pretty straightforward. This is just the basic intro to the story. Not much to go by yet.

“There’s a time in your life where you teeter on the brink of finding yourself. A fragile period where the only way you will get out alive is by the tether you hold to your friends. It is this tether that will direct your feet down the path that you will follow in life. These are the years that are engraved in our minds as the clearest pictures of life. The veil between innocence and the decisions we must all one day make is nothing but a gossamer film covering our eyes. The years we spent here are the most influential years of our ever moving lives. Cherish what you have learned here and never forget.”

I remember listening to the words of our valedictorian from my bedroom television. Watching as the cameras zoomed in on her face dramatically. My college graduation was broadcast on public television for the benefit of those who didn’t want to sit through an hour and ½ of people walking on stage to accept the piece of paper that acknowledge that we served our 4 year sentence. I spent graduation day sitting in my room brooding on the way things had turned out and glad that I wasn’t wasting my time with the ceremony. I had scoffed at the speech the valedictorian dished out to waiting ears of naivety. It wasn’t until several months later that I realized that her words held some truth. Just not in the way she meant or the way that I expected.

In the months following gradation I found in myself a new form of slothfulness. I went to my job. I ate on cue, I never slept in, and I even tried applying for a more permanent career. I kept busy. I was doing what every college graduate was doing that summer. Living life and trying to figure out what to do now. But for me the slothfulness was inside. My soul was dead along with its counterpart, my heart. Summer went by and was followed by fall as always. I became a secretary for a veterinary office. I did my job well and without enthusiasm. I bought an old used car to get around in. I had a small apartment. I was living, but that was it. I wasn’t experiencing or feeling because the end of my senior year of college I learned that if you have feelings there just going to get hurt. They tell you that rules are made to be broken. The same applies to hearts. Souls are made to be trodden and, squashed down. And love is nothing but the fuel for the pain that we will all feel someday. This was my grim outlook on life for the next 4.5 months accompanied by a sense of hopelessness in my fate. It wasn’t until that October, when I got away from myself and everyone else that I realized the truth of the words spoken at graduation. In those weeks I found that life could hold a sweetness that most have by now forgotten and a bitterness that I would never forget.