mimick

Halfway through the bus ride (thoughts stuck). He became suspicious of his reflection. It sat there so much easier than he did- with its full lips and oval moist rasping eyes. He became suspicious mainly due to its lack of colour. As if it were mimicking him with that ultimate freedom, to fit where ever it was put.

He calmed down although there was no one to focus on, no conversation to overhear. 

It was not like there. Where being on a bus was a pleasure, where you felt someone had stolen it from you when they offered you a ride.

He tried to think back. Far, far back to a time before the slugs and snails of his memory had begun to stir. He felt strangely damaged. And yet, he wasn't sure where he had contracted the damage. Was it recently? In school, that tumultuous, raucous, that free-fall they called education. The only push or shove in education's direction he'd been able to surmise was the slow beating a "group" gives to one's ego. Which in turn,  is the ultimate source, or the chisel which forms what we so freely jibe "the ego".

To think, without school, that he might not have his ego. And yet, without school something core inside him, threatened now, which formed one of its constituents, might be saved. The thought made him titter on the balance he hoped noone noticed he was already struggling to live on. It made you examine your own hand in wonder, like you were learning its lines for the very first time.

How the road can toss you! Not surprising, he supposed, given the force of those who a road is carriage to.

Recently, he had been unable to make up his mind if his life so far had been too long or too short. He wanted a cushion to fall back into, a hand on his forehead (where his mother's was absent). Breath near to his ear. But he knew, once again, like he knew other things, that this wasn't to be until at least year 11. Unless he could pick up a straggler. Someone who had fallen out of the status quo. Fallen out, maybe, of reality altogether. 

All together, the sounds were mounting in the bus. Preparations for departure were already being signaled. He looked once more at his reflection before he lost it. He'd only meet it again in a different guise, it weary after worlds of rambling, when he came to sit beside it, home bound, the same. A longer absence for himself than it, who hardly noticed. 

How, when, as he had heard someone say on television once, you have been programmed to think about the stars, can you be content with strained yellow wash of those leaves? Dancing on the thrill of their buds, balanced on tip, mimicking a struggle with those skeletal branches that keep them captive. What is more wonderful, loyal and obedient than their failure? Not his own? Mind alive, alert, awake. Not the right way to go into school.

He watched the last glimpse of him flicker as he stepped with one mild, dull, but lookedafter shoe onto the written tarmac. Here. To meet. To create and yet, unconsciously, that cumulative effect they called instant and unrecorded culture. For one hour. In a classroom. A lost individual, however many others. All crammed full. Simple things like the way they looked became the most important identifiers in this chaos. To be able to shout the wryest, crudest, funniest sentence the quickest. That was a lesson in the market place, if nothing else. Esther might say capitalism, whatever that meant or didn't mean these days.

He walked in, easily, smoothly. Two eyes, if only, following the whole oval from door ajar, light thrown at its opening in the dusk of the winter morning, to where one could veil half one's figure, crunching it up again under the desk. And feign performance, when really one was either listening, or if the teacher was dry, the class a little more irrelevant, speed away to damp grey places whose sides and openings were almost indistinguishable, but which people one sometimes knew visited. 

He wished, many times, (though he, of course, was not the right word. It wasn't all of him, and somehow it was also more than just him) that he could jump up and lead. Swish his arms, like a magician, or the conductor of an orchestra (a bus! The quip came to him, not certain if it were as equally profound as everything else or a stupid joke). Like swimming. Not in water, but in the rabble of the class, which was his most ultimate reality, that microcosm for all the world was to be, with figures, gestures, on every point of the spectrum he'd spent his life a pupil of.