I’m tired a lot lately, I’m finding. And yet, for the first time that I can remember in ages, I’m not at all sorry about it.
I know it’s been a few years, but I’m still very much in the habit of thinking of things in two seasons: The Summer and The Year. Throughout grade school and high school, The Summer was the happy period between June and September that I would avoid sunlight altogether, dwell in my bedroom or my basement, sleep when everyone else in the world was awake, and get up as soon as everyone else went to sleep. I was so enthusiastic about it that in the tenth grade my mother came into my room, her expression dangerously open and accepting, and sat down on the side of my bed while I played Tetris.
“How’s it going?” she asked me.
“Um, fine?” I answered, my attention entirely riveted on the screen, my brain locked into the patterns glowing there. Tetris simply was my spare time for years, until it got to the point that I could close my eyes at night and play it behind my eyelids. Around that same time, I finally discovered some friends and some new games, but once in a while I secretly miss the living death that only Tetris on the Nintendo could provide me.
My definition of “fine,” however, was insufficient for my mother, whose expression of loving openness wavered for a second. Beneath it, annoyance peeked out. She held herself in check for a second, and then asked me, “Is there anything that you want to talk about?”
So, I might have been fourteen, and I might have been stupid in a lot of ways that linger in my soul to this very day, but I knew a danger sign when I heard one. Wisely, I felt, I paused the Nintendo and turned to observe my mother, who still had the same expression on her face as when she entered the room. Two danger signs in a row.
“Uh,” I replied. It seemed the best path to follow, considering my options.
“Is everything okay?” she added, and peered at me. She was trying not to, but I could see her observing me, as if my sunless face was going to give her any clue as to why I wasn’t leaving my room or communicating with humans during daylight hours. “We haven’t seen you around too much.”
Danger sign number three: “We” implies a certain amount of discussion between mother and father, both on whatever issue they seemed to be perceiving at the time, as well as on the tactics they formulated to approach it. By that point, I wasn’t so much worried as I was confused — I didn’t do anything wrong, I knew, because I wasn’t doing anything at all. Unless playing Tetris, watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail daily and obsessing over Monkey Island 2 were crimes, I wasn’t sure where I had mis-stepped.
“Um,” I repeated, which probably sounded like I was backpedalling. She looked at me steadily for a beat, so cautiously I added, “Everything’s fine!”
I think it must have been a moment of decision for her, then. I really do sympathise with my parents sometimes, you know. It’s easy enough to villify them in your memory, remembering them as clueless or unsympathetic or whatever helped you inform your teenage identity, but it’s not nearly as convenient to remember how truly, unfathomably dumb you were. I can just imagine my mother sitting there on the corner of my bed, looking at my thinning face and the bags under my eyes, trying to gain insight into a brain producing noises that barely required me to move my lips. Finally, she just sort of shrugged and smiled and said, “Well, all right then, as long as you’re doing okay. We miss ya, you know.”
I smiled back at her and said, “I know. Thanks.”
She got off my bed and headed out, and I turned back to the television, ready to slide back into the abyss for a few more hours before dinner. Halfway to the door, though, she suddenly stopped.
I looked up at her, as she turned on her heel to face me again. “You’re not on drugs or anything, are you?”
My face went slack. “What?”
“If I go looking around here,” she said, “I’m not going to find anything like that, am I?”
“Huh? No! Huh?”
“Well,” my mother reasoned, “we don’t see you at all, you don’t go out to see people, you never come out of your room, what’s a person supposed to think?”
So, at the tender young age of thirteen, I learned that if you become sedentary enough in your lifestyle, people are going to start looking for reasons why. I wasn’t aware of it then, but that kind of inertia apparently stands in total defiance of nature, and therefore must be caused by drugs, or porn, or gluttony, or whatever it is that worries your parents. Guard ye, therefore.
Even later on, when I was working at either the theme park or the video store, it was basically the same mindset. It didn’t really matter if I was slogging through forty-five or fifty hour work weeks, since I needed the overtime pay anyway, and it wasn’t like I had anything to do. If I stayed at work well past three in the morning, it didn’t especially matter — I was used to those kinds of hours during the summer anyway, and it wasn’t as if I had much to look forward to the next day. No plans, particularly, no goals that really needed accomplishing. As long as there was a certain dollar amount in my bank account at the end of the summer, enough to cover my tuition, then I pretty much got everything done that I wanted to do.
I’d come home exhausted, I’d have my paycheque, and that was really enough. When people came back to school talking about their trips to Europe or their co-op jobs at NASA, or whatever the hell they did, it didn’t especially bother me — it almost struck me as a waste, even. To my thinking, summer was just a long, dead time; my Bizarro-World hibernation period. Three months wasn’t really enough time to start anything particularly serious before I went back to school, I would think to myself, as if I would somehow have launched into my life’s work if I had, say, six additional weeks. Just time to kill, time to sit outside at three in the morning and smell how warm the air was in the middle of the night, time to read a book while I ate breakfast, time to flip from channel to channel for a solid hour while hoping something interesting would be coming on soon.
This year? I don’t know. This year, I’m restless and a little unbalanced, and finding that I’m becoming addicted to doing things. Cleaning my desk up has given me a kind of immense satisfaction such as I didn’t think was possible — until I messed it up again a few days later, it felt as though I was living somewhere entirely new and more organized. Thanks to constant prodding from Scott, I’m up to the point where I’m running about fifteen kilometers a week, and I want to do more. I even bought an MP3 player off of eBay, promising myself that I’d use it to keep boredom at bay while I ran alone on the weekends.
I’m not as fat as I used to be. I weight the same, but some of it’s actual visible muscle.
I’m writing more. Not as much as I should be, but more. And I’m actually having ideas.
I went out on Tuesday night and took pictures. No particular reason — I just did.
I’m reading books. I’m downloading and ferociously archiving Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes as if they’ll disappear forever if I don’t. I’m becoming terrifyingly good at Mario Tennis.
I’m also edgy and high-strung, laughing a bit too loud at everyone’s jokes, getting angry a bit too quickly at traffic or Sham or the dogs barking at everything that walks past the fucking door, and all of a sudden very extremely vulnerable to alcohol. It’s as though some part of my mind has discovered that the year isn’t actually nine months long after all, and it’s doing everything it can to make up for lost time.
For the first time, I’m suffering from Summer Insomnia, and I don’t think I mind one little bit.