The Neurotic Schoolboy
I never wanted to sleep. What a dreadfully tedious idea it is to sleep and wake, sleep and wake, sleep and wake? I could deny myself a normal routine, but that wouldn’t do any justice to my mortality.
I suppose it would be just as accurate to say that I never wanted to be human, however tightly gripping the concept is, especially when you are surrounded by award-winning gossipers and free twentieth century books which are only capable being acknowledged by the sclera of mortals. Language? Hah. That, too, a construct. My room is perpendicular to my mother’s room, and as I would involuntarily wake at six every morning, I would notice the imprisoned dirty yellow grim light escaping underneath her door every day at six thirty, her opening the door at six thirty-five and filling my room with an echoing rooster at six forty. Needless to say, I am a big boy now and can wake up on my own every morning. She enters with her cackling voice to startle my little brother, of course.
I suppose it peculiar that the moment she evacuates the room my brother falls asleep again and the rest of the morning evolves into a period of disappointment and rage. The peculiarity isn’t warped in the kid falling asleep again, no, for that he is guilty of being human. What is truly idiosyncratic is the chit-chat which traditionally is enjoyed by women of age has now begun to influence the intellectual realms of a ten year old. I condone this now, but I plead a day where no paradigm desperately attempts to pose itself as indispensable in modern edification. Instead, I have a life to get back to. ‘Feroze?’ my English professor calls out, ‘Feroze, is everything alright? You haven’t participated today’.
What is this underlying obsession with participation during classes? I would rather read 18th Century Manx literature than participate in a class full of dead gooses. Do they not realise the futility of odourless engagement, an endless stream of thoughts and interpretations from students who don’t grasp literacy in the slightest and yet deem themselves literature students? What good do words bring if they cannot be read, enjoyed, related to, loved? Despite the tradition of sentences, I too, settle for the routine ‘I’m fine’. It’s elementary. It’s four in the morning and I am falling in love with the philosophy behind atomic radii. The quintessential circle stretches equally in all directions to form a beautifully compact and symmetrical sphere, and I wonder how many more days must go by until I could be as symmetrical as this sphere? Do I loathe atoms? Nay, I merely despise them. They circulate my body.
They are latched onto and they consist of the typewriters I type on and the sticky drinks I drink and the rough cotton shorts I wear. And while I delve into finding my perfect spheres of importance or intelligence or perfectionism, I have the atoms, of which I consist, living and breathing in brooding derision; mocking my delusional quest of existence. I could be tired, perhaps? I am dead in my fairy castle, and I wear wrath like silver slippers. You don’t notice my slippers at first, but once you see the white glittering aura of it and its piercing light shooting from my fleshy feet, you would never forget it. I don’t wear them often.
Maybe I should, if I don’t particularly enjoy the company of a specimen. In such a case, arguably, the slippers become conveniently appropriate. I awake in English class and I feel my slippers solidifying and I know what it means. There, sat, is my professor on her perfect stool and her legs crossed elegantly because she is a PhD student and doesn’t want to create the wrong impression. Here, I sit, on my nauseating sketchy blue stool, almost passing myself off as a lover of anaphora and punctuation marks, but each time I write – I forget. I must want so.
There is a throbbing ache in my heart which platters of scarlet wine tend to hold together, although with the agonising catch that once my conscious reaffirms itself I would feel worse than before. I feel the plasma locked inside my epitheliums, however many there are, gradually criss-crossing into surplus alcohol, moments away from failing. How delightful it must be to die. The harp playing in my heart doesn’t stop as it reminds me of the crashing turquoise seashores in Hawaii, and the nourishing twilights in Florence, even though I have never been. I am a fountain of red wine and there is no limit to my consumption, but once you taste my bitterness you wouldn’t want me anymore and that would destroy me. But I would remember my glass slippers and my glass soul and remember that you may splinter my perfectly idealistic China, but I’ll be on a beach in Hawaii someday, sometime, and I’ll recollect the sand I lost and the fragments I have yet to attain.
This time more beautiful. This time more alluring than that aged seventeen shrivelling neurotic schoolboy who loves short stories on neurosis or organic diseases or physiological trauma or whatever you call it. What inconvenience have I done to thee to be confined and restrained to the intellectual potency of a seven year old? How has a boy, like myself, risen up and tackled the shambles of fleeting glass borders into a new level of philosophical determination and perception? I apologise that here, there and everywhere I may not fashion sense, grow to adhere to, nor be accredited by the folk who invariably continue existing, but I truthfully have a mind of my own, and I shall not withdraw it for a class of seven year olds. I am an introverted learner, and I do not repeal my very human nature of individualism. But surely, to you, I have become rogue and no longer welcome with my perennial syndrome.
