365 Days (Part 2) | ✓

321. Wait Your Turn

321. Wait Your Turn: Write about having to wait in line.

Every day is the same day. I am a routine traveler, feeling the monotony of a journey made too many times. There is no passing of time because nothing differentiates one day from the other. I smile, I eat, I do my homework, but sometimes I forget I even exist. I'm in a zombielike state. The moment I wake up is the moment I cave under the burdens stacked onto my back. It’s better to be a sleepwalker through life.

And in the lunch line of Jefferson High, with the pale walls fading behind me into stains and splotches, and some big-boned girl smacking me in the face with her backpack every time she moves, and with the dull murmur of a hundred teenage voices pretending they're okay in idle chitchat, I stand and wait. I wait for a tasteless lunch, I wait for change to stimulate me, I wait for something to happen that makes it worth my attention being revived.

But there's the boisterous jocks behind me discussing the latest in college football and the pop of someone's gum obnoxiously in my ear, and the smell of their peppermint breath on my neck. My beat-up converse shift on the linoleum floor. I wonder what it's like to be out of here. To be done.

And there's Caleb, with his bright eyes, which rove around the lunchroom and have girls blushing when they feel his gaze; and there's Lydia, with her phone that ensares her eyes; and there's Sally, who laughs at everything because she thinks it's better than crying. All of us, going day by day.

There's me, apathetic and merely going. I wonder what it's like to be free.

*

Synopsis: I see public school as a dreary place.