Consequences Tomorrow

Consequences Tomorrow

     Ages and ages hence – a sigh.

     I was bored at my college graduation. I couldn’t breathe under the stupid nylon gown, and the frat brothers around me were drunk before the soloist hit her first flat note in “The Star Spangled Banner.” I had felt inclined to be patriotic at this momentous occasion and was more than slightly annoyed in a bored way. The secretary of a state representative was giving the old JFK speech about seeing what you could do for your country, but I’d heard it before, and by the time I crossed the stage to get my diploma, I cared just about as much as the other five thousand people there. I left the stadium thinking, “What now?”
     My parents swept around me with their cameras, and I smiled broadly holding my fake diploma and praying that somehow things might hurry up.
     We did the celebratory meal thing, and finally they left in a whirl of perfumed kisses and snapshots. I tossed the cap and gown into my cluttered backseat and drove back to my apartment. I tripped walking up the crumbly stairs, and I cursed as I tugged at the swollen old door pretending not to want to let me in. I walked through the kitchen full of teacups holding moldy chai and went straight into the living room. I hit the light switch and was rewarded a flickering and hissing florescent flood of light. I pushed a stack of notebooks to the end of the futon and sat wondering what to do next.

     I sat and they sat and we were all very good at silent stares.

     An unmarried husband wondering why why why he is alone and lonely and never to be married and cousins sad sad even though we were never close. The cat mrrows so I know she is there but I knew it before she spoke and she is not enough anyway. Is she? The teacher will mourn the essay I wrote yesterday, a good one all about Gatsby and the futility of the dream. Written with insight beyond my years. That understanding of Gatsby’s pink suit. All in a blue book, the good thoughts that is. With only one spelling error crossed out. The forecast is sunny and clear and I want it to rain. It should rain. You have to do things when you’re young and it’s too late. Not old but too old anyway. I watch the cat watch me and I swallow and I wait.

     I couldn’t help but start thinking about the peach in my refrigerator. There were much more important issues to be dealing with – like the competition of white society in Invisible Man but all I coulde think about was that peach. I wasn’t even hungry, and this wasn’t a craving. I just had to have the peach – like unconsciously lighting a cigarette having just snuffed the last out.
     There is really no reason to want that peach. I was massacring my coffee breath with potent mint gum – not flavors complimentary to peach.
     But as much as I felt that I needed the chilled warm fuzziness of peach, I didn’t want it. I could not find any logical reason to eat the peach. Yet as long as I denied myself the peach, I knew that when I got home, I would eat it.