Living the Dream

The morning came, and everything was as it was before, and I remembered everything but it didn’t feel real, and it didn’t seem to affect me at all. It was as if the last night, however long it was, hadn’t happened.

A headache pounded my skull like a machine, and I crawled out of bed and ached my way downstairs toward sweet Aspirin. I felt weird. Or I felt normal, and that felt weird, because I didn’t want to feel normal. I wanted my life to be different, and it wasn’t. I wanted to be enlightened, or full of wisdom, or to know and see the same things I did before, but I couldn’t. It was all gone.

I didn’t know what time it was; my watch wasn’t on my wrist. I didn’t remember where it was. At the foot of the stairs, I stopped for a moment, and I tilted my head a bit and saw the panorama of strange pictures on the walls. This wasn’t my house. This was Sophie’s house. I let out a quiet chuckle at the insanity that I could come this far without recognizing I wasn’t where I expected. It was weird how that could happen.

Sophie’s parents weren’t home, and I fixed myself some breakfast in her kitchen, or rather, poured myself some cereal with milk, and I couldn’t find the spoons, so I just held the bowl up to my mouth and drank and ate at the same time. The cereal tasted like cereal, and the walls looked like walls, and the table felt smooth like a table, and the very quietness of the house sounded like silence, and it was all very muddling to me for the reasons already stated. I wondered why the cereal didn’t taste like rock and roll on my tongue, and why the walls didn’t sound like soft velvet in my ears. It was all very much the customary way, and that was troubling. I lifted the cereal bowl high into the air above my head and let it drop, and it shattered loudly and violently on the tile floor, and all I felt was remorse for having broken her thing and soiling her floor, and I was only mad at myself as I knelt and removed the stain that really looked like it almost belonged in the unkempt house, which was really more of a shed than a house. Sophie’s parents were mostly like her, I figured, using things only as they needed them and not spending too much of themselves on the sensitive and nostalgic.

I put the normal broken bowl into the normal trash can and opened the normal door into the open world, and I walked out, and there were no epiphanies to be found that morning in the chirping of the robins or in the arms of the bright sunlight, except maybe in the lack thereof, which wasn’t very satisfying at all. Sophie didn’t live that near to me, and the long walk back home was long, and I felt every minute of it, no more and no less of it.

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Hey, guys. It's, uh...been a while since we've talked. It's been about a few months. About a summer, really. I've been busy, you know, just like you. Well, not busy at all, really, which has allowed me to be really very busy. You know, I've had a couple of jobs, but they didn't work too terribly many hours. I took a French class, but that was a joke. Other than my roommates, there wasn't even a full handful of people I knew living in my town. So I uh...wrote a novel! That was an excerpt up there in italics. Do you like it? I like it. It's from chapter 16. There are 28 chapters. It's pretty long. It's 161 pages in Word, which by my best guess might be somewhere a little over 200 pages of a novely book. Yeah, I don't know. I pretty much spent most of all my days this summer either researching or writing it. Six months ago, I never could have imagined I could have done something like this if I hadn't been confronted with a sudden and absolutely vacant summer to do it with. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of tired, but I'm really pretty proud of it, besides the parts of me that are less proud of it. I've been working since the end of May, basically. As a reference point, a couple days before this many posts ago on Classic Brian. I finished Friday, so I guess it took me less than 100 days of work. So far it is as yet untitled. But I did it. I, uh, thought you should know. 

Here's a pie graph that I like to call, "Why I Didn't Tell People (Like My Roommates) About This"

  

Robert Langellier