Growing Older

I think part of growing older is seeing all the closed doors. As a young kid, I wanted to do be a fight in war, explore space, be a rock star, or dig up dinosaurs in the sand. As I grew older, I realized that war sucks, space is empty, I suck at singing, and digging up dinosaurs doesn’t make that much money.

Growing older isn’t just your body aging and decaying. It’s more about how your focus shifts from dreams of success to visions of failure. Growing older is understanding that failure is more common than success. It’s about losing the wonder of life and explaining away that lose as “seeing the world more realistically”.

Dreams and the dreamers are scorned and ridiculed.

Sad and Depressing Story PART 2

This is a continuation of the story from my last post. Basically, it’s what I’ve written in the past 1 and a half… or so. I guess.

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Usually, it was just me and Lily for dinner. Our mom was usually gone because of her work for a fashion magazine and our dad was usually working late in research late. Lily and I would usually order out for Chinese because it made it feel like we were still kind of Asian. Sort of. Asian-American, at least. Most of our second-generation Asian-American friends were jealous of the fact that our parents were largely absent from our teenage lives, freeing us to the allures of alcohol, drugs, pre-marital sex, and substandard (at least, supposedly substandard for Asians) grades. Honestly, it didn’t really feel that much different to us because this was the way it had always been.

We ate in relative silence with the TV running in the background. Lily kept looking up like she wanted to say something. I refused to pay her any attention. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“What?” I said, feigning confusion.

“About Evy.” She picked around her food with her chopsticks. “I know you’ve liked her for a long time and that it must be hard to move on from that.”

“Mmm.” I shoved in a noodle in my mouth. It tasted deliciously greasy and MSG-y.

“I still think that you should give up on her though.”

“Mmm.”

A couple seconds passed. The garage door opened up with a loud rumble. Lily looked up to see Dad walk in. Dad sighed with relief. “Chinese again?”

Lily nodded. “That’s not healthy,” Dad said, grimacing, but he accepted the carton of processed noodles, limp vegetables, and questionable meat.

Lily shrugged. “You can cook something else if you don’t like it,” she sniffed.

Dad stuck a pair of chopsticks into his food and sat down at the kitchen computer to look at the state of the stock market. He began to eat, and then turned around as if he had suddenly remembered something. “Tyler, did you submit your early applications in yet?” he asked.

Crap. “Uh, yeah, I’ll get on that,” I said.

“Hurry up!” Dad said sternly. “You only have a week left to go. What are you waiting for? You should do everything as soon as possible.”

I waved my chopsticks impatiently. “I’m just editing the essays,” I said. It was a total lie, but whatever.

Dad made a disbelieving noise, but he turned back to the computer. “I don’t care, it’s your future,” he grumbled.

I rolled my eyes and kept eating.

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I was laying in bed listening to Coldplay over my computer speakers. If I ever made a movie of my life, I’d have Coldplay in the soundtrack. I couldn’t go to sleep without music. I didn’t like waking up to silence.

So. Tomorrow. I’d have to go back to school tomorrow. It’s not like my dad would let me stay home for something as trivial as being rejected by a girl. A pretty girl. A girl I liked. Nope, there was absolutely no chance of that.

I sighed and went to sleep.

A New, Somewhat More Depressing Story

Okay, so basically, I’ve had the idea of writing a high school drama/romance novel for quite a while now, that is, if romance can be translated into complete and total FAILURE, which it totally can! Although failure is a cold, hard mistress who doesn’t put out… At least she doesn’t have STDs. ^_^

Anyway, it’s partially inspired by what happened in my last year of high school, in feeling, atmosphere, and spirit if not in factual events and whatnot. Names have been changed to protect my person. Fun fun fun…

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It was quiet. The clock tick-tick-ticked. A drop of water fell from the spout and spattered in the sink with a heavy plop. A group of teenagers walked past the closed double doors of the empty orchestra room, happy in the knowledge that they were past yet another boring day. The buses outside the school rumbled. Light rain fell outside. Like I said, it was quiet.

It was dark too. The lights were off. There were no after-school clubs  in this room, and it’s not like any of the orchestra members were going to come back to get their instruments. What were they going to do, practice? Preposterous.

Evelyn finally looked up. The weak afternoon sunshine caught in her hair, brightening the light brown to a dark reddish color. It shone in her eyes too. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I really am, Tyler.”

Ah. Well. This isn’t going well. I opened my mouth to speak, and then closed it, realizing that there wasn’t much else to say. I nodded. I tried to arrange my face into a neutral expression, but it’s not like disappointment and utter failure isn’t going to show. I settled for looking up at the ceiling.

A couple seconds passed. “I should go,” Evelyn said.

“Oh that’s right, you have practice,” I said, eagerly biting on this new conversational direction. I moved aside.

She walked past me, opened the door, and then looked back. “We’re still friends, right?” she said.

I looked at her and forced of a smile. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”

Evelyn nodded. “Bye Tyler.”

I waved weakly. “Bye.”

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“So you finally told her?” My older sister, Lily, paced back and forth before me.

“That’s kind of what I said, isn’t it?” I flopped down on the sofa, a Pepsi in one hand and the TV remote in the other. “And can you get out of the way? I’m trying to watch Scrubs.”

“And she said no…” Lily said this slowly, as if trying to comprehend her own words.

“No, she said yes, and we’re having a baby in nine months,” I said.

“You see, this is why I’ve always told you to use condoms,” Lily said absent-mindedly. To her, repartee was instinctive. She looked down at me. “She definitely said no? Like, it wasn’t an ‘I’ll thinking about it’?”

“She was quite clear on the topic,” I said, craning my neck to see around my sister. I popped the tab on my drink. Lily heard the sound of the can being open, promptly stole it from me before I got take a sip, and then plopped down next to me.

“Oi, gimme that back,” I said.

Lily looked at the drink, then looked at me, and then took a huge gulp from the Pepsi before getting up, presumably to get her own. I swilled the drink a little bit. It felt like she drank half the can already.

“I say you give up on her,” Lily called from the kitchen. I heard her pop her can open. “There’s not much you can do about now, is there? You’ve been hung up on this one girl for, what, two years?”

It was four, but I wasn’t about to tell her. Lily returned from the fridge with a cold (full) Pepsi. “That’s a bit long for a crush, isn’t it?” She drank loudly. “I’d even go so far as to say ‘stalker-ishly long’.”

“Well it’s good to know that my sister supports me so much.” I flipped the channel to Spongebob. Scrubs was being evil and depressing when I wanted lighthearted JT and Turk shenanigans, not depressing patient-dying stuff. Spongebob was nicer. He was always getting into shenanigans.