jack_babalon | Pensive

Pensive
April 9th, 2007

The light soaking through the office window is tempting. I feel like I can crack it open, pop off my well polished shoes, cut the gordians knot of my tie, leap out before they grab me back in and actually splash into the sky without falling, without flying. Just swimming in mid air and free from the burden of my everyday concerns.

They do their best to make us forget it. They draw the shades. They fill in the light with blinds as gray as the carpet, as the paint, as the cubicles, as the hallway and our moods. It's not enough though. The light is too strong, so that the swaying shadows of the trees outside cast a series of silhouette kalideoscopes than run the length of the wall. The sun light burns white across the edges of the frames.

I'm a little kid sitting bored in the back of the class again. The teachers have confiscated my comic books despite my having cleverly disguise them behind the wall of an upright text book. My action figures as well. A band of intergalactic bounty hunters have been imprisoned until the end of the school year, forced to sit out their sentence in the Mrs.Ackworth's locker (how many toys, how many baseball cards, how many packs of chewing gum sit there indefinetly still?). I have even been disarmed of my pencil, that I have used to summon terrible monsters and clashing armies with. I was given a pen instead, my teacher knowing that I can't draw with one.

It was then that I would escape into my imagination. My silence was a veil between two worlds. One where I was a chubby kid with an afro who was inches away from being put into a 'special ed' class by the powers that be (they hadn't figured out how to drug children into obedience yet... or at least to do so cheaply enough to make it pseudo mandatory). The other world was a blast though! Ice cream flavored afternoons, dirt trails that led to impossible adventures, haunted houses that waited for children (who while under the magic command of 'I triple dog dare you' tip toed nervously into their lair), roaming firework battles that turned into a pyrotechnic version of 'Lord of the Flies', trying to learn how to throw Chinese Stars with a dull shuriken 'discovered' in an older brothers sock drawer, twilights that came soft just before nine at night and how having pizza for dinner every day was the only thing I knew i'd do when I finally grew up. It wasn't so bad looking back at it. I had that whole Ray Bradbury Dandilion Wine thing going now that I think about it (and have actually read Bradbury).

So, thirty some odd years later and I still sit in the back quietly. I have quotas instead of grades. I have bills instead of chores and a little beer money at the end of the week instead of an allowance I suppose. I have a blog instead of a pencil which, I at least, think is pretty cool. I have action figures as well (though they're not for touching much less playing) and most importantly I still have comic books which no one is big enough to confiscate now.

In three hours though I walk out of this cube and into the sun and it'll be like I haven't aged a single day since those ice cream flavored afternoons.