Nowhere Girl

Chapter One

With my pen propped between my index and middle finger on one hand, I dropped my chin into my other cupped hand.

Using all the attention I could scrounge up I twisted my face in concentration, tuning in almost painfully to my professor who was continuing on with the lecture. I’d noticed that with this with almost all my professors, they could talk without a pause or help from anyone. I suppose that’s half their job, though. I started to twirl the pen between my fingers.

And there goes my attention.

Oh, well.

Since I figured I knew myself pretty well, I didn’t bother to try and focus myself again. I’d known it was a lost cause the moment I’d sat down in the lecture hall, my mind was a shifty wanderer today.

Disregarding my binder that was split straight down the middle in front of me, notes filling up half a page, I leaned down to the bag that was terminally about to burst at the seams at any given moment. When opened it showed that it was not filled with school books like the rest of the students here. It was filled with tattered paperbacks and notebooks and pens. They were all clambering around the bag for space that wasn’t there.

I sent one last listless look towards the professor who was now wandering the aisle between the rows of seats as he spoke.

Flicking open my leather bond notebook that I’d only gotten the week before, I turned straight to the last page I’d written on just this morning.

Pausing with my pen hovering over the thick paper, I let my eyes drift over my hurriedly written words, the ink smudged in places and even a fingerprint in the top corner. As I swallowed what I’d written earlier the classroom and everything inside of it faded away into the background. I couldn’t help but realize that my writing was just a mad rambling, no plan or point to it.

That didn’t bother me. And before I’d even gotten towards the point where my pen had stopped this morning, fleeing off the last e with an unconscious flourish, I found myself that I needed no push to get into that familiar mood with the walls of a suddenly suffocating world pressing in upon all sides. I was always there, wasn’t I?

My messy blue scrawl was almost identical to what came from my pen as I picked up where I left off, except that time it was black.

… I want to be somewhere that people live.  I want to be surrounded by people who breathe for more than to survive.

People who are mad.

People who sing for nothing more than joy, dance for any reason but expression, smile because they want to and not for others. I just want to be near someone who burns so much you’d swear they would glow in the dark. I want to feel passion like that, experience it, even if it’s from another person. I want to be with people who would dance in the rain, fuck in the open and run naked through the rain. People who don’t judge or sneer. People who are consumed with the freedom a life should be.

 People whose passion is to live.

And maybe with their help, I could make my life into more than a commonplace person breathing only because that’s how they’ve been trained.

Maybe I’d be able to make my life into a wild work of art.

But there aren’t people like that here.

There’s no one exciting or mad around a place like this.

There isn’t life around here. There’s duty.

There are umbrellas, nine to five jobs, marital and proper sex. Desires are shamefully hidden from view as if no one has them, music is a popularity contest, the sunrises are ordinary, the touches distant, the art just cheap prints.