Chapter One

"Reach for the sky, for tomorrow may never come"

Stumbling into your house at two in the morning may seem like a strange experience to some. Not to me though, I was hanging out with all the wrong thugs and high on all the wrong drugs. Its amazing what the right(wrong) chemicals will do to you, isn't it? Yessir screw you royally they will, and laugh as they leave you crumpled on the floor, nothing but a pile of useless waste and a needle in your arm. This particular night I cruised in on a healthy mix of acid and liberal amount of weed. Nothing too big but it got the job done.

Walking through the black iron gate into my backyard has never been a more terrifying experience. Goddamn bats, man. Big as your head and fangs that glow in no light at all. They swooped about me and nipped at my ears. They stared at me with great big red eyes. Their outline was a blurred shadow, and I could not escape them. This is how I came to discover that death is bats.

But yes, stumbling into my house, two in the morning, right-o, moving on. Generally I spend a few minutes trying to wrap my uncooperative hands around the handle of my back door and pop in and sleep off the crap in my system. Wake up to the wonderfully disgusting smell of greasy bacon in the frying pan and promptly empty the contents of my stomach into my trash can. Or on the floor. Or if I'm really lucky, directly up into the air and let gravity work its magic. Yeah, those are the best benders. But not this particular night, lord no, not today, thank you kindly. No, that night the door flung open wide and I spilled onto the floor, which tastes like crap, lemony crap, by the way. Have you ever had a hangover so bad, it hurts to look at light? Yeah my parents apparently have, because they sure as hell wanted to make this as painful as humanly possible. There were flood lights (Christ on a cracker, they actually put up flood lights) in the middle of the goddamn living room! So I pick myself off the floor and amidst the usual swirl of colors and ghost shapes I pick out a sickly green blur, the kind of green they paint hospitals with to make sure the dying stay calm and tranquil as they whimper off into nothing. Personally, I say hell with that; I want to die in a room painted fricken fire truck red. Screw going out with a whimper; send me off kicking and screaming with a needle in my arm, for old time's sake. And, for that matter, forget about going off into the dark to "meet my maker" or some other bull crap. I want to get my dying ass dropped off on some flat burn straight out of Vegas and head off into frantic oblivion.

Slowly that sickly green, pea soup, blur I mentioned earlier materializes and I recognize my dear sweet mothers purple face, thick ropy veins standing out on her neck as she spits unintelligible gibberish at me. Something about disrespect and how my brother never did this. Oh wow, she is really getting into this, smacking one meaty fist into here equally meaty palm. I wonder if she will hit me this time? God, I hope so. Unfortunately, I cannot vomit at will even after copious amounts of LSD. I always need a little jump start, like say... getting punched! Puke all over her. Eat that you pathetic whore!

Looks like she is winding down. Damn, I was really hoping that I would be able to puke. Not just for the satisfaction of vengeance, but I really don't feel so hot. Here comes Dad, always the more subtle of the pair. They aren't quite good cop, bad cop though. They both suck. Ugh, my stomach is on fire. Is that normal? I can't remember...

Looks like I am going to puke after all. It is amazing how slow everything moves when you're wasted. I could see the little bits of half digested Burger King hurling out of my mouth in a stream of brown digestive acids. Oh and look! The Sun Chips I ate when I got the Munchies! Weird, I would have thought chips would have been dissolved seventeen hours after I ate them. One of life's little oddities I suppose. Mmm, I can still taste the cheddar. It's not wrong to swallow it back down is it? I certainly hope not. Waste not; want not, that's my motto.

Here comes the best part, parent's reactions! I love the little stunned bunny expression Mother gets when this happens. Eyes wide, jowls hanging down, and sometimes if you get her going real good, you can get little ropes of spit dripping out of Mother Dearest's gaping hole. Such is the case here as I spatter my guts all over her lovely, thousand dollar, fake Oriental rug. Ah, silence from her. Silence is golden. Silence. Something about silence makes me sick, because silence can be violent, sorta like a slit wrist. Words float to the top of the muck that currently makes up my mind. Where are they from? It's a song. I'm positive... maybe. Damn. Hmm, well the time to act is now while they aren't screaming obscenities in my face. I push myself off the puke stained carpet, pressing the brown lumps deeper into the pseudo-silk knots until the stain would be all but irremovable, sort of a last act of vengeance. I rise to my unsteady feet and wait for the room to stop spinning; I'd like to get off now please. The two worthless individuals who spawned me stare at me with the same stunned bunny expression. They are deer caught in the headlights and I am the semi. Eighteen wheels of reality bearing down at sixty miles an hour. One hundred points if I get blood spattered on the windshield.

Looks like they are expecting me to say something, nothing else would keep their damn mouths shut for this long. What do I say? It better be something epic. That's how it always is in the movies, a rousing exposé on the merits of the main character and the vicious villainies of those who dare oppose him. **** speeches never were my thing. So I think I will do this in silence. Silence can be (violent) epic in its own right. Plus, I fear what will come out if I open my mouth. It could be words or stomach acid. I am not really sure. Well this is awkward. A sort of Mexican standoff in my parent's living room. My mother glaring at me, red rage in her eyes. I don't focus on anything, especially not those miniature suns in pouring out blinding light. And my father shooting furtive glances between his monster of a wife and his druggy son. Oh what a tangled web we weave. It's a good thing I don't keep a lot of stuff that I care about in this house. Having to gather up all of my earthly possessions would be time consuming and I really wasn't in the position for a long, sentimental goodbye. A passionate goodbye to be sure, but not a long one. Damn! Mother has taken to throwing whatever is in reach at me in the absence of my parting words. Getting pounded with obscenely overpriced fake china does not sound appealing to me. My headache is bad enough, thanks very much. Well I have had just about enough of this. Time to make my exit. Well I'll be damned. Snagglepus himself, in my(their) living room! Exit stage left indeed! Lead on Snagglepus! On to my car, the only possession that I truly care about.

Time to search for the American dream. The Great Gatsby would be proud of me, were he not perpetually floating in his pool, only lumps of his gray matter and blood to keep him company. I have two ounces of weed and a rainbow assortment of prescription pills in my glove compartment. I think that is just as good.

So yeah, I finished the 7th and final HP book and I was left with an empty feeling. I grew up with HP and it was the first *real* book I read by myself. And now the whole thing is over. I am kinda depressed. I am left with the same feeling that I got when I saw 28 Weeks Later, where something connected with me on some deep level where I don't want to leave even though the credits have already come and gone and the sweepers are clearing the theatre for some brainless summer comedy. I feel like I am normal and I hate it. I don't want to be a normal person with normal problems. I want to be a wizard off to kill a Dark Lord, or the sole survivor of a zombie outbreak. Whenever I came across the question "What superpower do you want?" in myspace surveys or personality quizzes I would always come up with some stock answer "I wanna fly" or "I wanna be like Spiderman". Before I thought nothing of it but now I realise just how boring and unoriginal these responses are and how they are exactly what I don't want to be. Now after finishing a new Harry Potter book for the very last time in the rest of my life I realise what "superpower" I want. I want to be able to transpose myself into works of art. And when I say works of art I do not mean just paintings, which is what immediatly comes to mind for most people, but books, films, paintings anything where the cold and routine Real World is supplanted by imagination and creativity. I want to walk through a Bob Ross painting and look at all the "happy little trees". I want to actually BE there when Harry meets Ron and Hermione. I want to be included in thier fictional circle of friends. I want to be something other then what I am, which is an average student at a prep school who will have an average life and die an average death. Many people think its weird but the thing I do to cheer myself up is imagine what would happen if I were to die some kind of tragic death. One second among the living, the next soaring through darkness to find the light at the end of the tunnel. I imagine peoples reactions. My friends, my family and my enemies. Very rarely in these little fantasies of mine are their negative thoughts about me, except for once when I imagined somebody thinking "good riddance" and spitting on my grave. It was this fantasy that inspired me to try and patch up my broken relationship with him, and while we are not best of friends I no longer see him spitting on my grave and walking away. These fantasies allow me to become something more than average, a teen death. Something out of the ordinary and new. I will be sped off to new worlds, fresh, with the ability to be able to discover something again. I miss that child like sense of wonder where everything is new in the world and all the doors are closed, begging to be opened. Now it seems that all the doors in the hall way that is my life are open, but not inviting, just open. Revealing their secrets for all the world to see, and now the rooms behind them are no longer mine, they are the world's, with the world's burdens and the world's worries filling each room from floor to ceiling and obscuring any glint of hope, of discovery, behind a dark opaque veil. It is something that frightens me all the way to my core being. Once again I find myself wishing for a way out, something to rekindle the light that fills the face in the baby picture that rest here on my computer desk. I feel worn and jaded from a mere 16 years of living. And I wish for that light again, to take me back to the days when figuring out how to say the ABC's, how to write in cursive. Quiet little mundane things that are average, yet lift me out of my stupor and make the world seem new are the most important things anymore and God how I wish for them back.


P.S. For those that read this thank you for giving me the most special thing I can think of, an audience. An audience that listens to such ramblings and depressing twists and turns of my life makes me feel young again, that gleam of light in my eyes once again.