2 DAYS UNTIL TOMORROW

The moment I was handed my diploma, I dissolved.

At the reception outside, people took photos by the big oak tree that the school board planted when the high school first opened in the 1930’s. I daydreamed about the wind breaking the branches free and crushing me, so I wouldn’t have to wade through my parents, my real friends, their parents, and the friends that weren’t really my friends. I pictured it like in a cartoon -- clean, so my guts wouldn’t spray everywhere. I had a hard time imagining my guts without having seen them.

Standing against the tree, the gowned crowd and bouquets of laughing parents dolly-zoomed in and out of focus. Parents, teachers, friends, drug dealers, future-rapists, future-politicians, future-deadbeats, future-CEOs -- they all asked me the same questions: if I was going to college, what I was going for, what my SAT score was, what I wanted to do?

Each conversation ended with the same farewell, that I couldn’t go wrong.

But where was I going?

Had I made the right choice?

Is there a right choice?

What choice had I even made?

All I knew was that a foreign feeling crept inward like a pool hall parasite -- an eight ball of confusion, disorientation, detachment, or all three -- that would be my baseline from there on out.

***

My ninety year old neighbour Lucille died at the end of June while fixing herself some pie.

The bottom half of a pressurized whipped cream canister exploded and hit her in the chest like a rocket launcher. It caved her chest inward and popped her eyes out like snakes’, as if her body had to maintain some cartoonish spatial-pressure equilibrium. They placed her creaky old house on sale immediately -- the smell of pie still wafting and wading throughout the place the day of the first showing.

The new owners were foreign real estate investors who bought the house two times over-asking, shocking for a space frozen in the 70’s. Lucille had gone to great lengths to preserve her home the way it had been the year her husband died, with crisp wood panelling, scarred floral drywall, and succulent shag carpet that moistened the air around it.

It didn’t matter -- the new owners ripped it apart as soon as they signed the deed.

They were building a huge new place instead, a mega-gaudy three story hyper-contemporary house with mutilated sheet metal, bulging naked windows, and a hazardous koi pond out front, like a suburban Domus Aurea.

The construction was to our east, so the mini-crane and knock-off circus tents obstructed the sun that used to shine into both my parents’ and my bedroom each morning. Mom said it made her depressed. She couldn’t get out of bed spontaneously anymore, said she was starting to feel seasonal affective disorder even though it was the middle of summer. Dad would tell her to get the fuck outside, but she’d say no, no I’m fucking not, because the pollen and dust from the construction site was so bad that it stuck to the back of your throat like tar in a honeycomb.

Without a solar clock, I sunk into each morning with no concept of time and a collapsing concept of space, feeling less like a person and more dissolved, like nitrous oxide in a whipped cream canister.

My friend Jack, who lived in a gated community across town, let me sleep over at his place for a time. Said his parents were never home and that he needed the company.

I’d known Jack since the first grade. He had Accutane skin and an orthodontic smile, with veiled brown eyes that gave off the impression he was patiently listening to you when you spoke. Women loved that. Jack got his first blowjob before he was Bar Mitzvahed.

There were three spare bedrooms in Jack’s house, one of which had a skylight, so I jumped at the offer to stay there. I figured that I never fully woke up at my parents’ place without the sun breathing into my room -- just stayed in some kind of psychotic hypnopompic state, meandering through life like it was a dream. Jack’s seemed like a haven by comparison; light poured in from the ceiling every morning, and I’d wake up in a room embraced by the sun.

Sleeping at Jack’s didn’t help any though. Just made me a bit more disoriented when I woke up in a room that wasn’t mine and heard the moans of another random girl Jack had met on Tinder or Hinge or Bumble or JSwipe or Christian Mingle and brought home to fuck. Every morning I’d come downstairs to the same tale: damsel alone, waiting to be saved; Prince Charming on a walk, smoking weed; the unlikely hero, left to eat breakfast with a stranger, picking up the pieces of whatever bullshit Prince Charming had spewed the night before. Same ending, too: me, sitting in silence, providing a shoulder to falling tears that only served to dissolve me further.

After the fifth crying girl, I moved back home.

Back in the sunken 7 am darkness of my bedroom, I listened to the concerto of jackhammers and nail guns and cranes, wondering if I might explode like the whipped cream canister. Wondering, too, if Lucille had died with some pie in her mouth -- happy, even.

***

I started seeing a shrink the second week of July at my parents’ behest, a nice woman with a Spanish sounding name, pale white skin, and a particular vigilance for making sure we never went over time.

I told her all the things I’d been thinking, about how I felt like maybe I was crazy, or not really alive, or reliving something I’d already done on auto-pilot. She told me it was unlikely I was schizophrenic, or schizotypal, or suffering from Cotard’s Delusion, although she did tell me to let her know if I started hanging around cemeteries.

She said I was probably just going through a transitional patch, and that I should focus on letting life happen to me, like a tree that allows wind to blow through it, not fighting the breeze.

I tried my best to do what she told me. I even downloaded a guided meditation app, and all the rest. But every time I’d shut my eyes to take a deep breath, I imagined future scenarios of how my life might play out, all of them different in detail but the same past a certain level of abstraction:

School, work, work, work, work, work, work, die.

The only difference between the scenarios was how much money was in my pocket by the last step. I wished I had a remote like Adam Sandler in Click, so I’d be able to skip all the decisions and all of the shit; just kick back, sit on my porch, play solitaire, et cetera.

I already felt older than my age anyway. Like, a lot older. Not with the “I’m more mature than my age” pretension. I didn’t think I was that mature, it was more that I’d forget how old I was. That I still had a lot ahead of me, even though it always felt like the world might come to a spontaneous end. That somewhere, beneath the hazed apathy of my day-to-day default settings, I still had dreams. I hoped I’d still live them if I did get the chance to grow old. In my house, a lot of people never took the time to have dreams, let alone live them.

My parents had my brother young. He was fifteen years my senior, almost twice my age. Things were tight financially, and my parents' struggles gave him a bend for practicality. All that struggle seemed to sow resentment for the present, fear for the future, and a yearning for the past. Maybe that’s why I felt so old, homesick for a time that I’d never lived through.

When I told the shrink about it, how I felt much older than my age, she said it was something called age regression. I thought the name wasn’t apt, maybe age progression, or acceleration, or something like that. She nodded, smiled a kind smile, then glanced over to the clock. The session was over.

Throughout that summer, time accelerated a little more every moment. I would look up after what felt like five minutes and five hours would have passed. Then days, then weeks, then months.

Apparently by the time you hit 60, each year feels like a month.

Maybe I’m mis-remembering.

***

By the end of July, the house was insufferably engulfed in darkness, like a smoke-bombed sweat cave in Tora Bora, or the bottom of a suburban Ikea ball pit. Mom bought one of those sunrise lamps to help with the light, the kind that are supposed to help you wake up. It didn’t feel like the sun.

The muffled ambiguity of the house’s darkness made days melt into one another as I continued to dissolve. Being there was like being stuck in purgatory, but college only seemed like hell -- a Sisyphean trap of shit I didn’t care about, leading to more shit I didn’t care about in the form of some kind of high-paying job. My parents were excited for me -- or rather the money -- even though I don’t think they’d be able to explain my intended major if I seared their skin with the sun lamp.

I tried everything to stop the dissolution: I worked out, stopped masturbating, stopped drinking, did a coffee enema, went anal retentive on the bowel movements, started drinking heavily, and even did a week long screen cleanse. I began saying “yes” more than “no,” worried I’d been closing myself off from something that might save me.

At a music festival, Jack offered me molly. He said he’d heard things about its spiritual properties on a podcast, so I said yes -- one time, a second time, and then even a third. Each time it made things worse, made me feel less like a person.

The third time I was off a bean I rolled at a Ja Rule set and started wondering how Ja saw us all. Maybe we looked like little ants, squirming through each other’s heat, dancing off-beat to a song he wrote 15 years before. Made me wonder, too, if he even saw the world around him.

When Ja jumped, we jumped. When he raised his arms, we raised our arms. When he screamed Ja, we screamed Rule. We screamed louder when he said he couldn’t hear us. I wondered, did he really not hear us?

What do you think?

Did anyone else there experience things the way I did?

Did they experience it at all?

Drowning in mosh pits and drug-laden sweat, I started to feel like I was the only person there. Like I was locked into an incubation pod like Neo, or I was strapped into a straitjacket in an asylum somewhere, kicking my legs around in an immersive hallucination, everyone around me just projections of a false-reality.

My trance got trampled by some dude yelling and stumbling out of the mosh pit with a cracked-open head and bloodied palms. Shirtless and tattooed, he wore a fresh Bart Simpson one on his pec that stylized one nipple as Bart’s dick, festered and infected so that it looked like Bart had herpes. He was short, and when he walked by me I could see down to his skull, which resembled a fresh salt water-eroded rock on the shore of Italy. Although blood jetted all over the place like a seaside geyser, he continued singing the lyrics with Ja as loud as he could:

"that look in your eyes is like the sunrise when you're fuckin' me."

Mom threw out the sunrise lamp a week later.

***

Jack got cancelled at the beginning of August when the humidity was at its worst.

It was after a big party -- the last that everyone in my grade would attend -- for Angeline July. It was her eighteenth birthday, exactly 2 months before mine. She had a big house, one of those gaudy Romanesque revival ones that looked like a dwarfed castle with a big, deep pool, and expansive aquarium windows at the back.

Everyone asked her how her parents were so rich. She didn’t know, she said. Her mom didn’t work and her dad did something in finance. Wasn’t sure, though. She always said she never cared to ask because she was a socialist. At least according to the infographics she liked posting to Instagram.

In truth, I don’t think she could have asked her dad if she wanted to. He didn’t even show up for her birthday.

Her mom was home though, and she spent the night drinking a glass of Ambien-infused 2016 Chateau Haut-Brion Blanc. I knew because I accidentally walked into her bedroom while searching for somewhere to piss and she told me. She offered me some of the Ambien and I said yes, which is why I can’t remember the rest of the party. Why I can’t remember seeing Jack and Angeline go into one of her guest bedrooms like she said I witnessed.

Angeline outed Jack nine days after the party. She posted her statement to her close friend's story on Instagram first, subtweeted about it second, and then made a full-on TikTok third. She was purposefully vague at first, but after getting harassed and berated by guys from my school, other schools, and even locals we’d never heard of, she made her claims as explicit as possible: that Jack had stealthed her when he was going at it doggy.

Jack didn’t deny it, but he didn’t admit it either. And even if he had denied it, who was going to believe him? I don’t know if he ever felt bad. Even if he did, it didn’t matter.

People berated him almost as hard as when Angeline made the claim: girls and parents, from our school; strangers, from across the continent; niceguys, from Reddit; and even a bunch of Jack’s buddies, the same ones who asked him if he’d gotten a “kill” after he left the room with Angeline. So many people told Jack to kill himself for what he did that he had to delete his Instagram, and then Facebook, and then even his Tinder and Hinge and Bumble and JSwipe and Christian Mingle. Still, people found innovative ways to tell him to end his life: e-mail, MSN messenger, and Reddit. He had to wipe them all.

Without socials, I lost track of Jack. I never saw him after Angeline’s party.

The last time I did see him, when I’d left that night, I tripped on the door and fell out of the humidity of the house into the summer’s cool air. Jack was outside, alone, smoking a cigarette. He looked my way and nodded, but we didn’t speak. He just closed his waning brown eyes and took a long drag from his cigarette, inhaling from the butt like his lungs would stretch forever.

They wouldn’t.

***

During the last week of summer, city by-law officers halted the construction of my neighbour’s house. At that point, the new owners were pushing to add a one-room fourth floor with a massive dome-like skylight that fucked the sky like a giant dildo. Mom immediately called it in. She’d been studying the by-laws all summer in the darkness of her bedroom, waiting for any misstep that would call for the demise of the project.

The neighbours tore the whole place down, opting to build something a little more subtle -- something to better match the houses around it. Yet, with the end of summer imminent and a short fall anticipated, the owners wouldn’t begin construction until a year later.

The sun finally shone into our rooms and the air was no longer polluted by the detritus and shit wafting over from the plot next door.

Still, mom refused to go outside. I like the air in here, she’d whine to dad, saying the fresh air was piercing and harsh. He’d beg her to open the blinds but she’d say no, I like it like this, I’m used to the dark. I explained all of this to my therapist at my last session with her. She told me how circumstances change behaviour more than character or personality. She said that mom’s circumstances forced her to adjust, but now that she didn’t have to adjust back, she wouldn’t. She looked right at me, unblinking as the clock ticked behind me. People rarely changed unless forced, she said.

I told her about how I felt dissolved all summer, and how looking to school, I feared I would only dissolve further -- into meandering plasma, intangible and too hot to approach. I didn’t know how I’d start college, or grow up.

I already felt sixty. How would I ever actually be it?

She told me to be present, assuring me that with time propelling life forward and my new environment driving change, I would one day look at myself and realize I had fully formed, my current haze a faint, unimportant memory in my new day-to-day.

Looking back on the summer, I already barely remembered anything. The days felt long in their slow acceleration, but in reflection the banalities of the day-to-day fused together into melted nothingness lined with only a few moments of vivid imagery:

Walking across the stage, Ja’s set. Jack on the porch, Mom screaming at ByLaw.

It also made me realize that my whole life only had a few moments of categorical clarity:

My brother graduating high school, my first kiss. The time I broke my leg, my grandmother’s death.

People always say that when you die you see your life flash before your eyes, but I doubt that it’s the whole thing, start to finish. Maybe you just live through a few memories -- nine or ten, good or bad -- exhausting your biology for a couple of seconds to hold onto something that’s already gone.

***

The weekend before I moved to college, I passed by my old high school. The big oak tree was all dressed up with orange tape, so I pulled over to ask the workmen what was going on.

They said the tree had to come down even though it was only ninety years old. Apparently it had a Bretziella fagacearum infestation. Unprecedented in the region until recent years, climate change had provided meteorological leeway for the fungus to migrate northeast.

I stayed for the afternoon, watching the workers mark, then cut down the tree. It fell hard, got chopped to pieces, and was loaded into a truck to ship the wood southward. With only a couple feet of the tree left, I mounted its mutilated stump and stood tall, watching as the truck pulled out with the tree in tow.

Up a bit higher, I struggled to keep my balance, trying my best to let the wind pass through me.

by Conor Truax

Conor Truax writes, designs, and makes in Toronto, Canada. He can be found on Instagram @conortruax.