Raleighwood

Life isn't quite like the movies, but don't we try to make it so? Even through the perpetual anticlimax that is our lives we try to attach the meaning that the visionaries intend and the critics miss. Everything is a symbol, we have free dictation of our own will, and things will work out, they always have, right?

I ponder this as I walk my pseudogirlfriend into the main cafeteria. She won't commit but she will once she drops her stubbornness, her unrealistic standards, her delusions of my heathenism, and of course, her bigotry that she passes as religion.

Scanning the large mess hall for a small table, I see a natural habitat that makes my back tense up and my anxiety spike; it's a college but it's a small one, so the faces are recognizable. They have all the legality of adults but many the rowdiness and the judgemental eyes of children.

"Let's go over here," I tell Layla.

"Okay," she says complacently, clinging to my arm to assure I'm not spotted or seen as remotely available by a saner girl (God forbid).

Upon sitting and upon eating, we talk about movies, my long-term obsession that she has taken a new interest in, or at least feigns so she can nail Christ into my heart the way they did his son to a cross. Finding a nuanced window of opportunity, I make a suggestion.

"Think I'm going to see I, Tonya later this weekend," I say.

"Yeah?" She asked, covering her chewing mouth.

"Yeah my sister and I are going."

"Mhmm," she said, wiping her face with a napkin, "Have fun."

"Actually," I said, preparing myself, "Do you want to come?"

"...What?"

"Do you want to come to the movie with us?"

Without missing a beat, she replied: "No, I'm not comfortable with meeting your sister, but you can go," she said, as if granting permission.

"...I don't understand."

"What do you mean?"

"You've never met my sister? Why wouldn't you want to?"

"Well, you know what my beliefs are," she explained, "I know she's bi, and I know she's a drug addict. I don't want to hang out with someone like that. I don't think you should either, but I mean she's your sister, so…"

And thus what began as a simple invitation ended with me and my only friend staring at one another as if we'd each grown another head.

"Um… Alright."

The lunch went on, and it went on quietly. Layla was half-decent at drawing, unspecial at acting, but great at acting as if her judgemental and hateful ways came down to her simply having class and being the better person. And over the following minutes she managed to prove formidable at acting as if she didn't just offend the only friend she has at this college.

After lunch I escorted her to her class, where she would then stop and face me mere feet away from the classroom door, finally addressing the mammoth of a problem: "Are you mad at me? For not wanting to hang out with your sister?"

I sighed and shrugged: "A little… I guess. But I mean we'll get through it."

I then leaned in and gave her a hug, a ritual we usually shared when parting ways.

As I pulled away, I saw she had become red-faced and teary eyed. She tried to control her voice but I could tell she was not trying very hard. She, in a hissing, whispered, sob, said: "Please don't be mad at me."

I rolled my eyes subtly enough for her to not notice and said "Well… I mean… She's my sister."

"Please…"

"I'll see you later," I turned and walked away.

As I went down the hall, I caught some estranged and suspecting looks from my classmates who saw I had left Layla in tears. I tried to cast it aside with a shrug in a vain hope that they would mind their own business. I knew they would discuss it more, try to comfort her maybe. Maybe she'd even tell them about the horrible heathen who committed the crime of wanting to see this girl-fucking pot-smoking twin sister. That's on them.

This was not the first display of a disregard of empathy towards those around her. Layla fancied herself a proper Christian girl, so Christian in fact that she disregarded some of the most base pleasures of our humane presence, not just sex, but also thinking for herself. I recalled watching with her amovie with a sex scene; she paused it and consulted a priest (at nearly midnight) to ask if he was okay with her watching this film. I could barely remember the film; that hour of getting that theological consultation would be laughable one day though, that much I knew, even if I now found it discerning.

Another instance would be the days leading up to the preceding Halloween; Layla knew that I had a very minimal experience in dating fields, and whilst she consistently claimed not to care (for she herself had never dated at all) she would occasionally allow her condescending pity to slip out. It was two days before the end of October and we were eating dinner after a lukewarm response to a new Halloween film. I was discussing the party I’d gone to the preceding week, the one Layla was too good for, in her own more polite words. I could even remember the texts I’d gotten later that week, “These people you hang out with are disgusting,” “All they care about is their next high,” “They don’t give a shit about you.” And after a very scrupulous debate, she said she’d file it away, and I let it rest, despite us both knowing that wouldn’t last.

But after that Halloween film, I’d told her that some people were smoking pot at the party. She asked in an accusatory tone if I partook, to which I told her I didn’t. She then proceeded to ask in her holier-than-thou tone: “What else did you do? Did you go to a whorehouse?”

A firm eye-roll: “No, Layla, we did not.”

“Because that would involve you actually getting some for once.”

And after that comment I stood up and walked away, even though I knew I’d soon retrace those steps. We both knew what she said, it didn’t take a linguist or psychologist to know they were to some extent premeditated. But I was too grateful for her spending time with me at all to not go back, and once she cashed in her tears via text, that’s precisely what I did.

As I reflected on this en route to my class, however, I knew I did it not out of gratuity, nor forgiveness, nor kindness, but simply because I had no choice.

I joined my sister in a relaxing evening off bad reality television and a meal of vegetarian ambiguity. She lived with her boyfriend, who was in the other room, playing some computer game. Her other roommate, Floyd, joined us in the living room, sipping an energy drink (at 8pm, no less) and tapping a synthesizer hooked up to his headphones. I'd met Floyd just a month earlier and he had moved in with my sister shortly thereafter. He seemed like the kind of guy who was always praised just enough for his intelligence to the point that he never actually used it. He was, therefore, good company for my sister, I'd decided.

"So did you ask her?" asked Morgan, my sister of ten minutes after my own birth, as she took a hit from a joint, one as ambiguous as our meal.

Lost in imaginary space, contemplating my place in the world that may be nonexistent if not for Morgan, I feel back to Earth as she asked, "Clyde?"

I turned to her, "Hm?"

"Does Layla want to come with us this weekend?" Morgan clarified.

"Um, nah," I said, trying to dance around conflict, "She's busy, has stuff going on, can't do it."

I sensed that Morgan knew I was lying as much as I did, but opted to say nothing. That was our greatest talent, ignoring obvious problems and hoping they'd go away. Sometimes they did but usually the problems merely inflated until being finally addressed in a confrontation with either our parents or my therapist.

"Alright," she said complacently, extending her arm, "Would you like a hit?"

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"You what?" Layla nearly spat at me.

I shrugged.

"You took a hit, and you didn't even know what it was?!"

"I mean… Turned out to be weed, so…"

"Oh, well that's just fucking great, Clyde," she snarled, "I can't believe you."

My facial muscles remained unmoved, and laid in their apathetic rest. "Okay."

She scoffed and walked off. I sighed and made my way back to my dorm, holding sacred the mere minutes that were to come before her inevitable row of texts saying she "Just didn't understand," and how I'll "Never find salvation" if I keep up this "sinful" behavior.

And that was the part that she knew I found infuriating. She knew full well that I was agnostic. She knew that I did not resent nor have qualms with religion, but also that at this point in my life I had no interest in it. She would often make an effort to manipulate me into thinking this was selfish behavior, and even when I yielded for the sake of a good night's sleep, I would know that she knew that I didn't buy it.

Laying upon my bed I considered sleeping through my next class. Cory, my roommate, sat on the desk adjacent to my bed and played some Playstation game.

My relationship with Cory was representative of my relationship with the vast majority of my class. The best of a bad situation. He tolerated me, perhaps even enjoyed my company, but was certainly not going to make any effort in my favor, as I knew his friends thought little of me. I vividly recalled overhearing our suitemates mocking him for being the "odd man out" and having to live with me.

Despite how often I tried to file away the inherent coldness of Peace College, it was difficult when I was consistently shrouded by feelings of paranoia and oppression. I felt eyes on me whenever I walked about the campus, and would often hear whispers and light laughter. What I said or did was irrelevant, for I was either as nonexistent as Layla's open-mindedness or I was, in their eyes, a mean-spirited Columbine imitator who was simply yet to snap on my abusers.

I had never found those jokes amusing, but knowing that how I felt did not matter, I had retired to my place and tried to simply endure my discriminated and outcasted stance by "rolling with the punches" until graduation day.

But in that moment I chose to stop my lingering and internalized whining and drifted away, through my next class and into the weekend.

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Having awoken just after classes ended for the day, I solemnly strolled across campus to talk to my professor about what I had missed and whether or not I had any assignments over the weekend. In doing so, I quietly became once again lost in my thoughts, wandering to the dream I’d had during my premature slumber. I was only out for about three hours, but it felt like the dream had lasted several years, decades of time. I felt as though I were someone else in small captured glimpses from childhood, to around my current age, up through middle age and up to retirement; there were fleeting images of both memories of playgrounds and driving lessons as well as hypotheticals such as marriages and living circumstances. I saw myself doing menial things like spray painting on walls and picking out mortgages and making career plans with a woman whose face now escaped me. It felt to be a simulation of a life played out in full. I knew dreams only technically lasted for about ten minutes, leading me to contemplate just how surreal the stream of consciousness experienced in dreams truly is.

I passed my classmates quietly without conflict or interaction, but mostly remained lost in the world of the dream I’d had. I was trying relentlessly to not only remember every part of the life I’d lived over course of those visions, but trying to do the cinematic tradition of attaching meaning where there may not be any to be found.

It was then, however, that I felt my shoulder whack into somebody else’s.

Although I saw him at the corner of my eye upon turning the preceding corner, I did not dwell on his presence. I did not know this young man but knew him to be a contrast to Cory, in that he represented the true way people in communities like Peace felt about outcasts. I did not even know his name, I simply knew that based on other interactions with him that he was a mean-spirited homosexual. He made his disdain for me clear and showed no interest in clarifying why.

I stood on the side of the hall and tried to ignore the shove I had just received from this stranger. I pulled out my phone to distract myself from an increasingly foggy psyche fueled by adrenaline and rage. I would not present Peace with the anger that I could tell the institution so clearly wanted from me, nor would I become the stereotype that they had pinned on me.

Scrolling through for the first time since waking up, I saw a multitude of texts; one from my mother, one from Morgan, but nine, however, from Layla. Most of them were several lines long and particularly unhelpful in cooling my head. They were laced with spiteful words, but just careful enough to avoid outright bigotry and homophobia. My sister was not gay, but was dating a trans-man, and was therefore a bad influence, a stance made worse by her affinity for marijuana and her enjoyment of alcohol.

As I read the texts, I only grew angrier, but the one that blurred the line of my breaking point to the extent of obliterating it altogether was the last one, the one that read: “You’re never going to have actual decent friends if you don’t change.”

The self-righteousness was not only appalling and hypocritical. It was deeply sunk in a sea of delusion, one so deep that I knew then that she would not at any point drop her hatefulness, instead accusing me of being the bitter and angry one.

This however did not deter me; my mind was made up and I could not be converted to letting this go, much less converting to an ignorant brand of Baptism. I went back, turning the preceding corner once again, seeing the young man who’d just shoved me nearing the building’s exit. I approached him quickly and, his lack of awareness finally catching up to him, I turned him around and punched him in the face.

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"What's going on here, Clyde?"

"Bullshit."

The twerp butted in: "Now that I agree with."

I glared cleavers as our college security guard shushed him. The twerp gave a signature eye-roll.

"Just…" The security guard clutched his eyes, and I was sympathetic. Nobody who takes a security guard at a private Christian college would guess they'd break up a fight. “Explain what happened.”

“He punched me because I’m gay.”

It was my turn to roll my eyes: “You know that isn’t true, bitch.”

He pointed his finger at me and spoke: “He’s had it out for me since day one. I’ve tried to talk to him and be his friend but he just keeps bullying me.”

Seeing no point in arguing, I remained silent. For this was the type of person who saw himself as so angelic that he could literally do no wrong. He may actually believe what he was saying, as he sounded genuinely convinced.

The security guard, who’d witnessed my punching him and his subsequent shoving and crying, sighed again. “All I know is, Clyde, I saw you punch him. I’m gonna talk to the school’s president, and I think we’re gonna have to suspend you.”

And without another word I arose from my seat and walked out, either to jump off my dorm’s balcony or sit in my car and endlessly holler into the windshield. I chose the latter before I got to the parking lot.

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Layla sat quietly during the film; I loved movies all the more when I brought Layla. At first because I had someone to talk to after the credits rolled. These days it was more gratitude for her silence. As much as I desired companionship and understood my situation and options to be limited, I sometimes thought life would be easier without her. Simpler, I’d always concluded, but not at all easier. I had a target on my back due to my singular status.

Starting in my freshman year I spoke very little, the majority of my teenage years shrouded in an unspecified psychosis that would cause the years themselves to dwindle as I entered my twenties. Flirting with selective mutism, I gave my predatory classmates little to work with, so they would go after my lack of social life and general unattractiveness. When I was unresponsive to the small jokes and comments, the provocative and harsh nature of the statements would only get worse until I got fed up and left, often to their amusement.

I could still see my dorm’s suite just one year prior-- Ty, a filter-free unaware outcast who kept me around the same way gun-toting rednecks kept beer cans on their property, was my roommate at the time. We were in the suite; I was on my phone, he was speaking loudly as ever into the computer monitor, talking to the closest thing he had to actual friends.

Ty had spent his first year of college trying to woo anything with a pulse and the right estrogen levels. But given his wildly inappropriate and boundary-free nature they mostly avoided him, even if he himself was too oblivious to see it. He called many people friends, no matter how much they shook their heads and rolled their eyes when he approached them. Eventually though, he did find a girl one year ahead of him about as desperate as he was. Ty would showcase her around for just enough time to justify pushing her side and tending to his games at the end of every day.

Taking a break from the games, he talked to another suitemate of ours, a wealthy upperclassman who always boasted about owning the Angus Barn one day. I sat there, at the counter, on my phone, when I heard the upperclassman ask: “Hey Clyde, you going to that fancy dinner thing the school’s throwing this weekend?”

“Nah, I don’t think so,” I replied, still staring at the phone: “Got to work. Not really interested anyway.”

Ty snorted laughter and proclaimed: “Because he has no one to go with!”

I glanced up at their snickering and rolled my eyes. But after a beat, I’d decided I’d lost enough sleep over his loud gaming and whining to justify something else. I approached Ty, leaning on the heels of his four-legged chair, and craned back the head, hard enough to make him think I would knock him over, but not hard enough to actually do it. Slightly amused with myself, I walked back to the counter and went back to my phone.

I heard Ty get up, but I did not look away from my phone, even when I heard the anger in his steps. He would then put me in a headlock and take two steps back, putting me on the tile floor. Letting go, he said, “Nice try,” before going back to his game.

This instance would not be mentioned by him again. In an unprecedented fury, I went out from the Bingham dorm hall and out to the cool air and the hammock outside to calm down. While I would never retaliate, I would distance myself from Ty, whilst going back-and-forth as to whether abuse was better than pure isolation, or vice versa. Naturally, he did not notice this.

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As the movie let out, I escorted Layla to my car; Layla stayed at home, so the situation of my suspension was something I could keep quiet from her. I knew full-well that she would chastise me for “choosing violence.” I hadn’t the time nor energy to hear that lecture from a girl who not only chose hate as so many solutions, but kept it bottled up so as not to anger her liberal-arts colleagues.

“What’d you think?” I asked.

“Eh.”

“Eh? I really liked it?”

“It didn’t make any sense though…”

“I mean--I think it was a Biblical allegory, honestly,” I confessed.

“What’s that mean?”

“I mean I think they used Bardem as God and Jennifer Lawrence as mother Earth, and--”

“Oh. Yeah I don’t like it.”

“Yeah, I know why.”

She got really serious: “It’s sacrilegious. It’s blasphemy. It’s a disgrace.”

I sighed, and couldn’t stop my comment from coming out: “You should really be more open-minded if you’re interested in movies. He’s just expressing his frustrations.”

A long pause.

“I mean you’re the one who’s not open-minded, really.”

“Yeah?” I asked, openly pouring a canister of salt in a reopened wound: “How do you figure that?”

“You won’t accept Christ into your heart. That’s close-minded.”

The conversation would escalate, and get much worse, before finding a satisfying conclusion in the form of silence.

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Sitting quietly beside my sister after the movie, Floyd was off getting drunk at the bar. I tried to make small-talk with Morgan. I loved going to the movies with people, but I saw it as pointless if they did not want to discuss the film thereafter. And Morgan was very frustrating in that sense.

And, somehow, the conversation turned to a story she had read about how certain people were simply not allowed to express anger at their circumstances. Whether it be due to their identity or circumstances, Morgan preached how these groups being discriminated against were in constant grievance with mainstream society.

“Yeah, I get that,” I told her.

She looked at me for the first time in a half-hour, dumbfounded, chuckling: “No, you don’t?”

“I’m not allowed to get mad, either.”

“What are you talking about?”

“People like to give me shit and talk shit about how I’m going to massacre the school the second I get a little frustrated. They get me angry on purpose, and laugh when I do nothing about it.”

She went quiet.

I went on: “I just know it’d be worse if I actually got mad, so I have to just leave and bottle that shit up.”

Morgan, after another moment, finally responded: “Clyde, you can’t be discriminated against. You can’t understand what those people are going through. Stop claiming otherwise. It’s offensive.”

She went back to her phone.

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Try as I might to shrug off the notions of others, I found the misunderstanding to be very disheartening, as I knew your image in the public eyes to most certainly be part of what made people who they were internally. And being cursed with awareness stronger than Ty’s gave me a bitter resentment that I could only read as understandable.

But as I passed the brick dorm housing on my way to the parking lot, knapsack in hand, ready for an unannounced week home in suspension, something caught my eye. I turned and graffiti on the pure brick structure of the wall. The word “FORGONE,” had been written and crossed out, the word “FUTURE” following it. The latter word remained, louder and unmarked.

And in that moment I nearly wept, for it was the graffiti from the dream I’d had.