I Really Will Be Alright in the End
I am sixteen years old and my hands down, 10-out-of-10, favorite album is Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I get a burned copy from Lynn a few months before it officially releases. Lynn has straight black hair and is both cooler and more popular than I am, so for a rare moment I am an insider. I listen to it on a Sony Discman that I’ve connected by cassette tape adapter to my car speakers.
It’s March, Bush is in the middle of his second term, and I know exactly zero percent about politics. My screenname is SanDiegoGuy9187 but I’m starting to use gchat more, and texting killed instant messaging anyway. I lost 60 pounds last year after I ran every day for three months and stopped stuffing my face with shit food. My arms are spindly and my face is sharp. I feel attractive in flashes and it surprises me when I do. I still won’t take my shirt off in front of people.
I go to church every Sunday, same way I’ve done my whole life. A lot of weeks my dad will ask me to sing with the worship team or play trumpet during the offering, and even though I’d rather be running or sleeping or anywhere else I say yes. My parents are pastors, and they deliver sermons to the congregation about a God I’m believing in less and less. If Jesus knows everything we’re thinking, then he already knows I believe he died and stayed that way. I don’t know how I’ll break the news to them.
I’m a junior and have been harboring fantasies about my friend’s dad since middle school. Sometimes he’ll walk around his house in running shorts and nothing else. I don’t realize I’m memorizing the way hair economically covers his athletic body until I recall the image involuntarily. I think about him when I’m in the shower and before I’m falling asleep. We live in the church parsonage where pastors and their families have lived for decades, and there’s a hallway in it with pictures of my sisters and their husbands and kids. I spend a lot of time wondering what my family picture will look like.
I drive a maroon Chevy Prizm that we got when I was in second grade, this zippy go-kart of a car that I use to get to work. My desk is in the business office of a Ford dealership in Redwood City, which is like 15 miles from my high school in Palo Alto. I work from 3:00–7:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays when it’s not track season, plus eight hours on Saturdays. I file invoices, answer phone calls, and run errands for the women in my department, and in return they teach me how to swear in Spanish and show me what happens when you put a tampon in a cup of water. They ask me about the girls I’m dating and whether or not I’m having sex, and I tell them I’m going to wait until I’m married. I become their surrogate brother, they, my wide window to an intoxicating world beyond my reach.
I have a TV in my room and thank god. I sleep with it on. I’m so anxious and the noise competes with the voices in my head long enough for me to doze off. I have a Ziploc bag in my dresser with a fistful of my mom’s sleeping pills that she doesn’t know I’ve taken from her cabinet. I only take them on nights when the TV doesn’t work.
Jane is my friend and we’re in Chemistry together. A few weeks ago she and I drove my car west on the 84 for an hour until it came to a dead end at the coast. The sun had set hours before so the sand was cold and we couldn’t see the ocean so much as we could hear it; crashing in on itself over and over and over.
I have no way of knowing that I’ll go to college in San Diego and meet a woman there, that I’ll get engaged to her because I’ll think it’s the only way I can hang a picture on my parents’ wall, that I’ll call it off four weeks before it’s scheduled to happen and will spend the wedding day at Disneyland instead, that I’ll feel unbound, finally, and will write in my journal at a bar up the street from the hotel that “it’s nice to be at peace with myself,” that I’ll learn to demand a better life, that I’ll date one boy and then another, that sex will be fun and make sense, that I’ll go to seminary in New York to understand it all and will fall in love, that I’ll get engaged again but this time for keeps, that I really will be alright in the end.
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