the lint of boredom

I spent the entire afternoon like that, staring at the ceiling from my bed.

Outside, I could hear Dad yelling for the dog to come home. She had run away again. It wasn't that she hated it here, she was just adventurous. Maybe I was the only one who understood that. Maybe I felt like that myself sometimes.

Every time, we would get her back, and every time Dad would threaten to get rid of her. He never meant it. I think he loved her just as much as the rest of us. He just got frustrated.

The sky was the mottled gray of a dirty sidewalk, and I wondered if the seaplanes that buzzed over the house had wheels on top so they could roll off the clouds, clattering over pebbles.

I hated the noncommittal sky. I wished it would just rain, or shine. All this compromise was getting to me. Nature isn't supposed to be political.

Books littered the floor, but I wasn't able to keep my eyes on anything. I just drifted to the asylum-green walls or the wire frame of my glasses. I kept thinking about inner turmoil, and emotion, and these blizzards of consciousness that swirled inside my stomach, and I wondered if there were any warm cabins, lit by tea and company, where I could find a moment's peace from the frozen crystals of silence that peppered my face.

At some point, I was seized with the maddening desire to steal my parents' station wagon and just drive, find some state where no one knew me, no one hated me, no one understood me, and simply start over. Find some place where I could let go and try to be something real.

The desire passed when I got to thinking about finances and plausibility and the government, but the whispers and echoes it had left fluttered around still.

I decided that someday I'd have to grow up.