Category : Books-Non-Fiction

Sub Category : Biography

My Huh? School Years 2001-2005 (2/3)




        If you love music as much as I do, you could pick a song to be the soundtrack for a season, a school year, or phase you went through in life. Yet, if a record company tried to sell the soundtrack to your life, you wouldn’t have many sells. When someone else can’t enjoy every single song on it, that’s when you know they made it for you. 
        Today, it’s not music that is my drug of choice. What gets me high is the nostalgia that each song brings that has me enslaved. The feeling is better than any drug I’ve experienced. If I could take a shot of nostalgia, straight to the vein, I would’ve overdosed a long time ago. 
        One particular band brings me back to one of the greatest times of my life, senior year. If you want to know how happy I was then, listen to Broken Social Scene’s “7/4 (Shoreline).” Listening to this song brings a comforting feeling of reassurance that just because you’ve forgotten how great something is doesn’t mean it’s ceased to shine as bright as it had under the summer sun of 2005. 
        The school year before that summer, I only had four major classes I had to take to graduate. I have done this all in one semester, where I’d finish high school in December, but I wanted to stay the entire school year. By this time, I looked forward to school. I spent most of the day doing whatever I had wanted and calling it “teacher’s aid” or “office aid.” However, these parts of the afternoon were not as fun as the mornings, during my mandatory classes. 
        It used to be that I’d look forward to seeing the second girl I had dated the year before—a beautiful, young freshman volleyball girl. Though, before my senior year had begun, I had gotten caught and maliciously arrested by the karma police. It had been time to suffer the inevitable, universal consequences for being an asshole and not showing a wink of sympathy towards my previous girlfriend. Always alone with her head down, the hallway would grow silent as she inched through my group of friends. She had wandered the halls like a ghost, broken and torn all thanks to me. 
        By then, I had been high every day, which tuned my senses down. The weed helped fight away the black, overwhelming sadness her bleeding heart exuded. It had been too much to bear, thus; I looked away. And to pay for this, my cute little, freshman volleyball player had broken up with me. Both of us had grown tired of each other, which had eased the stabbing, until someone grabbed the blade in my chest and twisted it, telling me she had cheated on me during the first month we were an “official” couple. That hurt worse. 
        This was nothing compared to the torture my heart would suffer later, and I believe my heart knew it. For, it recovered in no time as she cried the entire hour-ride back. She had broken up at a wake-boarding show she drove us to—also where I found out about the cheating. Loud moans escaped her lips in-between the random suppressed sounds of hiccups. Her wails echoed throughout the brand new Lexus SUV she had just received for her sixteenth birthday. She paired the noises with tears pouring out like windshield fluid without wipers to wipe them away. I, on the other hand, felt calm, collected, and excited., I had taken long chugs of burning goodness from a handle of Tito’s Vodka before I stepped into the car. 
        With the vodka settling nicely in my stomach, I needed something to block out the pitiful bawling coming from the mess next to me. Something needed to kill the awkwardness she had created from her untimely breakup. As I turned the radio on, sympathy smacked me across the face—the CD inside she had been listening to was the one mix tape I had made for her a few months before. I pressed my lips together in a flat line as I watched those gut-wrenching sobs tore through her broken heart. All the while, the sound of violins seep from the speakers as Broken Social Scene’s “Pitter Patter Goes My Heart” plays. It was the last song off their record, You Forget It In People, previous to their self-titled album with the song that defines my high school years. 
        The waves of liquor crashing along the walls of my stomach had drowned all sympathy. Along with the wonderful thought of not having to sit with she and her mom (a very nice lady) watching another dead-end episode of Lost, something else had occurred to me—


       … I was a free man, again.