Temporal Lobe

         He writes music.  Ever since he was little. Lately, he sits in the park behind his house, interminably spinning on the tire-swing.  He is, truly, a gifted composer. But he hates the attention. And it’s possible that the only thing he hates more than the attention…is music. And when somebody hates something that much, it doesn't matter if he’s gifted.

And he wishes he could use all of his senses equally. See, he exists in a haze, everything obscure, everything murky. But he hears things loudly. Everything rings, and his muscles grow tense, and his blood gets thicker, and all of his weight sinks down into his heels. Because his brain feels flexed, and he wonders why people only ask him about music.

He’s gone through a lot of favorite places, but the tire-swing, so far, has stuck the longest. Eventually, they all get somehow tainted for him. But the blurred circles, for now, as he spins, make his head feel normal. His world, in these dear and hushed moments, somehow merges with reality.

He puts his feet on the ground, through the hole in the tire, and he stands up, brushing the snowflakes out of his long, wavy, and dirty brown hair. He slowly walks home, taking the crafted trail he’s been working on for months, through the woods, to his house. The ground is frozen, and so are his toes. He notices that he’s starting to wear through the bottom soles of his Converses.

He gets the mail, unconsciously flipping through it without registering its contents, trudges up the driveway, and unlocks the front door. He’s happy that he missed the mailman in the park today-- he parks there to take his breaks. But everybody knows that the mailman’s a pedophile, so the park is really no mystery.  Once inside, he kicks off his shoes by the heating vent, lights the pumpkin spice candle on the kitchen table, and flips on the free Christmas DVD that his stepmom got for buying a sofa at the Pottery Barn. He turns it on, even though it’s February. It’s already six o’clock, but nobody will be home for hours, so he chooses a microwavable dinner from the selection in the garage freezer.

His high school forced him to see a counselor last year. They told him that they were fretful for him, because he’d begun to pull away from his friends. It’s funny, really, because his music got way better. He wasn’t depressed, like they thought. It’s just that he’s accustomed to isolation. He hates that loneliness has a negative connotation.

He thinks it’s ironic that, for his whole life, ever since he was little and in grade school, people have told him to not do drugs. But the first thing they told him, when he got older, as a supposed outpouring of care and concern, was to take a pill. A pill that would help all the badness fade away. Really, he wasn’t sad. But he took them anyway. It seemed easier. In fact, he found them laughable because they, the pills, made him feel nothing. Not even happy. A flat line. So he stopped taking them. His name is Jeremy.

He loves school, but he’s not good at it. Easily distracted. He’ll graduate this year, though, and he’s aiming for a perfect attendance record. In three years and five months, he has never missed a day. Even when he was sick. Already accepted to three universities, he adamantly does not want to go to college. Maybe, though, he’ll go to the one in Delaware.

Last weekend, he went to his aunt’s birthday party with his father. It was held at her new boyfriend’s house. Customarily, everybody drank and smoked, until a unanimous level of wasted-ness was achieved. Except for Jeremy. He doesn’t drink. It was okay, though, because, throughout the lunacy, his transgendered, male-to-female cousin spontaneously decided to entertain everyone by passionately performing Cher songs on the karaoke machine.  His father was outwardly vocal about his discomfort. But Jeremy, for the occasion, was calm, fixated, and inspired, listening to the music, her singing. She was striking, sporting a sleeveless, satin purple gown, wearing a generous portion of brightly-colored eye shadow, her light hair pinned back, but draping her shoulders. As it happens, Jeremy isn’t gay or transgendered. He just figured that she, his cousin, was the most honest human being in the room. 

Earlier this week, he got his cast off. At his stepmom’s annual New Year’s Bash, he wasn’t paying attention, and he tripped, falling down the stairs, into the basement. Fourteen stairs, to be specific. He’s been counting them since he was little. It broke his arm, and he got a white cast. But he colored it black with a fat-tipped permanent marker. The smell almost got him high a couple of times.

Because he was still wearing the cast at the birthday party, though, his cousin asked him what had happened to his arm. He told her, as he’d been telling people for weeks, that it was a battle injury. She’s about the only one that ever smiled, laughing at his joke. And he asked her what bathroom she uses when she goes out in public. Again, she laughed, pleased to have found a familial ally, capable of being just as honest and outspoken as she is. On the car-ride home, his dad asked him if he was a homo.

He walks to school every day. Even when it’s cold, and even though he has a driver’s license. He can’t afford a car, and taking the bus is disgraceful for an upperclassman. Plus, people always try to talk to him on the bus. Stupid, petty things that waste his time, making ugly clamor. To him, it’s not worth the noise, especially if it’s not, at least, even moderately pretty.

He’s scared of drugs and alcohol, different than most of the people around him every day. He believes that they make you weaker, creating splinters in your brain’s crafted and evolved walls. He’s afraid of bad things seeping into those fractures. This theory has been developed, over the course of the past few years, with Wayne, the homeless man who sits outside of the Shell gas station on his way to school. Jeremy thinks that the dirt caked into Wayne’s wrinkles makes his motions louder, his existence heavier, his skin an instrument.

Almost to school, he passes an elderly gentleman, outside of a coffee house. He’s disheveled, rugged, and unclean, slowly tottering with a walker, clearly judged and gawked at by middle-class suburbia. It makes him sad, because he always liked that coffee house.

People turn away, covering their noses, and Jeremy realizes that there are feces running down the man’s leg, staining an already filthy pair of red sweatpants. And he’s not wearing any shoes, frailly scuffing along with pieces of cardboard haphazardly tied to his feet with pieces of twine. And the pain must be excruciating, his feet mangled and leaving bloody footprints on the sidewalk, making sticking sounds in the February cold. People bypass him quickly, avoiding eye-contact. And the tennis balls on the front two legs of his walker are worn too thin. It all echoes with brutality. And Jeremy can’t keep the tears from pouring down his cheeks, because this is a tragedy. Relentlessly blaming the victim, perhaps better captured as a survivor, he thinks that the human race has a duty to itself to do better. Jeremy hears the man’s watch ticking, and it’s too slow. It’s deafening. 

He stops in his tracks and turns around, going back the way he came. Today, of all days, he deems himself too delicate to attend school.  Distracted and not composed, he walks to the park. He spins on the tire-swing until he pukes up his breakfast. And he prays that the man will be alright. Even though he doesn’t know who he’s praying to. And for the first time in awhile, he gets up from his swing, to instead walk the park’s path, shaped like an eight.

He thinks it’s really terrible that people in this country are so neurotic. Always thinking that people are coming, ready with really big sticks, to beat them. They’ll all take advantage of you, you know. The end is nigh. It’s a shame, Jeremy thinks, because it’s ruined them for compassion.      

And, after a long time, he smiles. Because he’s decided that he will not go to a university to study music. Maybe, after all, he will go to that one in Delaware, but only, only to study literature. Something new, not something that he’s already equipped with. Something that will resound with novelty and resonate with daily challenge.

Because not everybody can be a hero.