Unnoticed

I waded through my teenage years, struggling in the muck between being cool and being a loser. I was lost in the gooey middle of life known as mediocrity. Nobody picked me first when we divided up into teams and nobody picked on me when we commingled in the hallways between classes. I was nothing more than an also ran in every sport I played and valedictorian was just another word I couldn’t spell unless I looked it up. Most of my teachers needed to use their seating charts if they wanted to call me by name. Even the herd of kids that had walked past my face countless times over the last four years knew me only as “Oh yeah, that guy.”
I was unnoticed.
I was a ghost, an apparition.
I was an unheard whisper.
I was an unperceived particle of dust floating around in a world that kept expanding exponentially out away from me. Everything got bigger and bigger and life kept moving faster and faster. Nothing about life made any sense. Nothing I thought or did seemed to matter at all. Nobody even knew I was alive. Nobody knew who I was. I didn’t even know who I was.
I was lost in my own skin.
And I hated it.
I wanted to be noticed. I wanted to be heard. I wanted to be somebody and I wanted to do something that would make the entire world stand up and take notice. I wanted to scream out loud across the whole planet and make everyone listen.
But I didn’t know what to say.
I didn’t have any great words or giant ideas. There was nothing behind the bravado I wanted to display. I was pretty much the tiny speck of unimportant that life had labeled me.
So there I was, at a crossroad between accepting my fate or trying to be something that I could never become. I could slide into the meaningless role assigned to me or spend my life struggling to show the world how great I really was.
I refused to choose.
I said “Fuck it!” and took the easy way out.
I got all sorts of high and forgot all about it.
Shit was a lot better for a while.
Life wasn’t this giant puzzle I needed to solve anymore. It became a series of moments that only mattered for as long as they were there. I still was unnoticed but suddenly I noticed everything. The small corners of everything around me were lit up. I dove into the tiny parts of life I never knew were there and swam wide eyed into the vastness all around me.
I experienced all the clichés.
I heard the silence, smelt the colors and tasted the music. The sensation was boundless and even though I was still small I felt like I was part of something beyond immense. Sounds silly, but it is true.
It was all that and more.
But I was dancing with a duplicitous partner.
Soon the shiny parts dimmed and all the reality that I had been avoiding caught up with me and hammered me with a vengeance.
Being wasted wasn’t a diversion anymore it was my new reality. All those fun nights didn’t end with me passing out softly in my bed or on a friends couch. I found myself, more and more, trying to stay awake in some holding tank surrounded by all the other riff raff rounded up by the police that night.
I started doing things I never thought I would. Things I thought I couldn’t do. Not me. I wasn’t like that. Was I?
But I was.
That was me cooking up the shitty coke we got from the projects so we could smoke “the good stuff”.
That was me snorting smack and justifying it by saying “At least I wasn’t shooting it.”
That was me pawning some crappy camera I stole from my uncle to buy drugs.
That was me pinned under my jeep after I flipped it into a swamp.
That was me sitting in a New Haven jail for six months.
It was all me.
I remember the day I got out like it was yesterday. When I got arrested it was summer and I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. My buddy Chase was there when I walked out the front doors. Cool as he always was, he had a flannel shirt with him and he tossed it to me.
He drove me back to Cheshire but I had nowhere to go. He turned around and brought me back to the city. We smoked a bowl on the way. I hadn’t been high in such a long time. It felt good, but it wasn’t the same.
There weren’t any hidden corners for me to see anymore. Shit was just there and it all looked the same. I was in an easy fog and I let my head rest against the passenger door window. I watched the scenery blur past me as we sped down the Merritt Parkway. Chase didn’t say anything. He always was the best at just being there when you needed him and not fucking everything up with words.
He let me out somewhere that doesn’t matter.
“Are you sure?” he asked me, knowing I wasn’t going to answer. I just closed the door and watched him drive off.
So there I was, at the crossroad between accepting my fate of being who I had become or trying to be something that I knew I could be.
It was an easy choice.
I felt the chill air sting my bare legs and pulled the flannel shirt tighter around me.
I knew a guy that lived close by. Maybe I could crash at his place for a bit until I put my life back on track?
I was still unnoticed by the world around me.
At least now I was starting to see the real me.