Fiction: Group 3
Treading Water
ISF Academy Secondary Division, Lee, Lily - 14, Fiction: Group 3
ou wake up to a world of desolate white apartment ceilings and pollution-gray rain, short tufts of
black hair and pastel earphones lying on the wooden panels beneath you. The Pearl River Delta
cries downward through the metropolis outside, and cargo boats bellow in the distance, noise
muted by the sheet of fog cloaking the city.
An alarm clock hammers obligations into your skull, but you kill it with a few quashes of your
index finger. You, honestly, could not be bothered. The phone calls, the text messages, the notifications –
they could wait until the next morning, or next eternity for all you care. Right now, you decide, was a
concept many people didn’t seem to grasp. Instead of a speed-of-light time frame it was a timeless
unbroken period wherein eyes are cast to the ceiling, ensnared in a web of captivating daydreams and
merciless, knifelike thoughts. A kaleidoscope bleeding reality into
what-if
s and
if-only
s.
A brush against the back of your hand, so soft that it could have been a dream. If you let slip of the
memory, it will fade into nothing, and the secret will only die with
her
, too well-kept to have ever been
real. But it’s all a part of this fantastical web of stories, strings pulled and threats exchanged, each smile and
touch and frozen stare calculated to the point of being beyond caution. You seem to enjoy your rhetorical
questions and misleading and lies-by-omission and downright lying just a little too much. At least, that’s
what she tells you, in an accusatory tone. But both of you know that she’s willing play your game. Willing
to shatter her dreams and weave them into your reality.
… In some ways you’re just like a river, going with the flow and helpless to change. Everyone ends
up in the same place and (
you’re smart, you know this
) that’s why you don’t attempt to change your fate;
the currents can be fast or slow but they’ll always lead to the sea, no matter what kind or how many
backward paths you take out of life. You still have absolutely no idea what you’re doing, and convincing her
of the same gives you some illusion of control – power over her beliefs, her mind. Because no one ever said
that relationships were healthy.
Occasionally the guilt hits you and you realize that you’ve destroyed both of your lives, and then
you apologize for everything and nothing and anything you can possible fault yourself for and push her away
and shut down completely, for a few days or a week, and she waits because she hasn’t lost her mind, because
she needs her grades and her pride/honor more than she needs you. For a while you and she are stone-cold
strangers in a colorless hell of trapped spirits and broken minds and homework piling high, high, high on a
pedestal of spoon-fed dreams. The resume you will write. The universities you will attend. The recipe for
perfection that everyone around you strives to reproduce. It has become another standardized expectation, a
prerequisite for Living, Making a Living, Getting a Life, etc. Marrying. Having Children. Things you are
too young and broken to think of.
In the end, your Perfect-Pedestal will crumble to dust, and you will pay for it with your soul.
Then, all of that struggle, all of that work and sacrifice and agony would be for…
what
?
You ask her this, desperately, with tears streaking down your cheeks (but boys don’t cry), begging
her for an answer that does not exist. Calmly (though only because she needs to be sane for you), she asks if
it matters at all.
Am I not enough
?
In the end, it’s a challenge, a question of how-perfect-must-you-be. Abide by the recipe or
deviate for uniqueness? Which one will get you the Better School, the More Perfect Life that you would
spend working constantly, anyway? Why graduate at all when you have Steve Jobs and school shootings and
millions of Perfect-Pedestals toppled at the slightest tremor of the ground you stand on?
Well
, she says.
How else would you live
?
Not like this
, you tell her.
Not like this
. And then you entertain her with your dreams of a Perfect
Future, your
if-only
s,
but-that-will-never-happen
s. For the heartbeat of one or two stolen moments, the
two of you live in your fabricated fantasy. Then it’s back to your life flashing before your eyes, so full of
debris and ugliness and flaws and running its course
fastfastfast
. Rushing headlong but going nowhere. Just
like the river that cries outside.
Once upon a time, you were a blank canvas. Then society injected
poison/garbage/propaganda/beliefs into your bloodstream, poured slag into your system, polluted the river
water. They taught you how to live with their stupid,
stupid
education system – because
how else would
Y
