Rotting the past future

J. ARSON Year 13 Columba College

THE old desks, initials you and your friends carved into rotten wood. I mean, you were bored in class, what else were you going to do? Remember the time you wrote ‘‘vandalism’’ on the school wall in lurid red washable marker? Of course you don’t. You were young, childish. It was a childish notion, a childish joke. It rained that night. Blurred out your memory, washed scar lines out of your brain until the pink flesh was a clean slate. Lines of new memory and thoughts and ideas ready to be etched in permanent ink. What else would you have done with that new opportunity if not ruin it? Your life was fresh then. Bold. It used to be full of future, and potential. You used to be full of future and potential.

Do you remember the first teacher to look at you with disappointment? When you watched them hand back that internal, bright red NA scrawled over the front page. You’d poured your heart and soul into it, trying, trying, trying to get any other grade.

Of course it wasn’t good enough, never goddamn good enough. Never enough, not until you started getting the same high from failure as you used to from success.

Because one was achievable and one was Not.

So with a washable nontoxic marker you scribbled on your fingers. Left the bright red ink to soak into your skin until you got home where you used the collected rainwater to scrub your bones clean. Your parents stopped trying months ago years ago. You’d never stopped trying out of a desperation for them to care about you anyway they would.

Your high school experience drenched in the acid rain of your own expectations. So now, when you’re here, looking up at that tower, your future in front of your eyes you cower, use fresh cut grass to hide, scratching a new design on the old rotten desks now sitting on display.