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I looked out the window of our minivan for the first time in two hours, since we were going on vacation. We were heading toward the Golden Gate Bridge on a rainy, cold afternoon, when, for the first time in my life, I gasped out of absolute shock. I know, I know. Why gasp at a bridge? I mean, it’s only a bridge; it’s not like it was the first time in my life I’d seen a bridge. And it wasn’t. Instead, it was what was happening on the bridge that shocked me.

There was a man, about in his mid-thirties, being held back by two older gentlemen. He was only wearing a white tank-top and jeans, with crazy hair and bloodshot eyes. He was screaming ridiculously, trying to get out of the men’s arms.

“Let me do it,” he kept yelling at the guards. “Let me jump, you bastards!”

We had been learning in class about California’s history, and the fact that the Golden Gate Bridge was the most popular place to commit suicide in the world had came up. The teacher handled it with ease, except when one girl who sat in the back row asked a simple question:

“Why?”

The teacher stopped dead in her tracks. She didn’t have an honest answer for the girl.

“Well,” she finally began, trying to state of an understandable explanation. “We have structure to our lives. We’re built on the foundation of our family, friends, and others we depend on, much like the bridge itself is. With time, we grow, and develop ourselves, and our “bridge” grows in size, until we hit a monumental moment, until we reach the sky.

“Some people, however, aren’t built on a good foundation, or some have something else they come across that weakens their foundation. They can’t handle the pressure being put upon them, on their bridge, and the bridge comes crashing down, comes to an end. We can try prevent the crashes, of course, but sometimes they’ll happen, and they’ll just come crashing down anyway.”

I sat there, in the minivan, staring at the man. He was now on his knees, sobbing into his tank-top, with one guard still holding on to him. The other was on the phone, talking to someone. He then put the man on the phone, which caused him to be even more hysterical. The man finally calmed down, hugged the guards, and was escorted back to his car.

I thought about what my teacher said about the bridges, and the structure they needed. She had said that the foundation was the problem, and that, sometimes, you couldn’t stop the bridge from coming down. And, though that may be true, you can always rebuild.

Photo credit: “Golden Gate Warning” by noesym

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I sat there, in that same seat in the back of the bus, listening to the raindrops slamming against the window. It was melodic, and mesmerized me. I had always been one to recognize patterns, whether they were worth noticing or not. It was a habit I had, for better or for worse, and it couldn’t be stopped. Some would find it obnoxious, to always hear music out of such trivial things, but I considered it a treat.

Outside the window was a scene of pure chaos; rain flew everywhere, with large winds blowing green grass all about. There were farm animals, too, dazed and confused while grazing in fields, wondering how they ended up in this storm, and wanting nothing more than to exit it.

I tried to take my mind off of the weather and began to look around the bus. It was nearly packed with people trying to weather the storm: a young mother with two boys was sitting in the very back, trying to deal with her crying offspring; an elderly man and his wife sat in the front row, holding hands as their wet, thin hair dried; a dog walker brought along his entire troop, including two poodles, a bulldog, and a Rottweiler, which scared a young girl sitting next to the dog walker, who was sobbing into her mother’s dress. There were skaters, and businessmen, and readers, and dreamers, and everyone under the Sun, all in this small bus.

At that very moment, a thought popped into my head: we were all here for the same reason. We all had different upbringings, different backgrounds, different wants, different needs, different professions, different family, different friends, and different lives. But, at that very moment in time, we all wanted to do the same thing: we all wanted to weather the storm. We all wanted to try and lessen our problems, one of our many, many problems, by hopping aboard a bus, and staying dry for a few minutes. We all wanted to make our lives just a bit easier, just a bit more manageable, in that moment.

I turned around and looked out the window one last time before exiting the bus, filled with strangers who I felt close to, and saw a rainbow coming from behind a large tree. I smiled, and walked out, silently wishing the other passengers good luck in life, and passing on the melody of the raindrops.

Photo credit: “Rainy bus ride.” by Michelle R.

Midnight

A man sat on a train station bench, facing the tracks. It was extremely dark, to the point where nothing beyond two feet of one’s person could be seen, yet the only lit light within this train station shown on him, like a floodlight from the heavens. The train station he was residing in was located in Nethala, Kansas, which normally wouldn’t have made a difference, except for the fact that he was dressed in extremely fancy clothing. The man wore a jacket made of the purest cotton, dyed in the darkest navy blue known to man. Atop one eye sat a monocle, made of the finest silver and fashioned in a perfect circle, while the other contained a wooden sphere, used in place of an actual eye. But perhaps his oddest attribute was a puff of red hair sprouting from the middle of his cranium, like a plant rising from the cold, dead earth. It was fashioned stylishly, however, and smothered by a dense top hat, though the hairstyle remained quite obvious.

Within the man’s arms was a box. The box, on the surface, looked quite normal: a light brown cube with a light brown lid, labeled “FRAGILE”. The only unique thing about the container was a bright orange ribbon, tied across the box very sweetly, as if the objects contained within were to be given as a gift. Whatever was contained within the box must have been of grave importance to the man, as well, for he looked nervous, sweat beginning to drop from his large puff of hair. The look on his face screamed for a train ride immediately, an escape from his current situation.

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Him

I walked into a typical history class, eight-fifteen on a Monday morning. The classroom was half-asleep, wishing the weekend was still upon them. However, despite any of their fantasies, their dream would never come true.

“Class,” He began, sitting at the front of the room. His large mustache looked like a monkey’s tail, and, when compared with His bulky, brown glasses, He looked like He walked out of an eighties teen movie.

“I hope you’re wide-awake, for, today of all days, we can’t stop,” He continued, staring down his students with a maddening glare. It was these times when I was glad to be smack dab in the middle, where, no matter how hard He tried, I was out of sight, surrounded by imbeciles who droned on and on about women or wrestling.

“So, let’s begin by going over this weekend’s reading.”

Simultaneously, nineteen desks opened, grabbed a rather heavy textbook, and paged through until they found the pages that they were supposed to read over the weekend. None of them did, including myself, but it wouldn’t matter that much. While He reviewed the pages, the class normally slept, or texted below the view of the teachers.

“Please, if you could,” He started, “put away your textbooks.”

Confused, and somewhat frightened, the students closed their books, and placed them back in their desks.

“I’ve been noticing a lack of participation throughout this class,” He said. “I want to find a solution to this problem. So, I thought, why not see what you can remember?”

The room grew extremely silent. We all knew what was about to happen, and we all would have wanted nothing more than to sink into the ground and disappear off the face of the planet.

He knew we were catching on, and smiled evilly.

“Why don’t we start with you, Tim?”

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Space, the final frontier.

Or so they say, thought Shadrach, standing atop a monumental boulder, looking out into the distance. He had been up extremely early that morning, looking through his telescope for any sign of life other then his small constellation. Alas, he had no luck; all he found was a floating piece of debris, most likely from an orbiting monitor, and a falling star.

Shadrach began to give up, and began to pack up his equipment when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something blink. Immediately, he turned around, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever he had just spied. But it was gone, disappearing in the blink of an eye. But this small flash gave Shadrach hope; what if something else is out there? What he’s not alone? What if there are other constellations, millions of millions of miles of constellations, waiting for him to discover them?

Pondering this, he began to walk through the deserted city. It was extremely early in the morning, and besides, Shadrach enjoyed being alone. It was common to him. With his mother and father giving him over to the mentors, he had always had to fight for himself, and be his own person. It wasn’t like his mentors would help him. Oh no, his mentors were only there to teach, and only teach they did. So Shadrach lived alone, under his own rules, trying to discover more, and learn more.

He continued to walk down the empty lanes. Besides the patter of his footsteps, and the rhythm of his breathing, there were no other sounds. It seemed as if he was alone entirely in this constellation. But Shadrach knew better than to think that; all his information pointed to life beyond his constellation. Though he never received any contact from a foreign creature (yet), signs showed it was logical to assume that life could be maintained outside of his constellation. If his colony could live upon a planet as small as they did, who’s not to say an even larger settlement could live out in the Undefined, in an even larger planet?

But it was no use trying to talk sense into these people, Shadrach thought. Any point he brought up was shot down almost immediately, no matter how plausible it was. Many argued that, until communication was received from these outsiders, it shouldn’t be considered fact, or even thought of as a theory. Others argued that, if these noncitizens wanted to contact them, they would have done so by now, thus the idea was total fantasy.

Shadrach, who would usually side with logical thinking, believed in this theory more than anything he believed in. He had gone over what would happen when he discovers these strangers himself over and over in his head: He would arrive off a plane containing these people from the Undefined, and accept all apologies from his own people, for their stubbornness and their stupidity. Then, Shadrach would hand over the noncitizens to the government, and from there whatever happened to them wasn’t important. As long as his point had been proven, he would be satisfied.

Shadrach, still walking down the narrow streets, was almost lost in his daydream, something that his mentors would never allow. Yes, dreaming should never be according to them. But Shadrach couldn’t help it; he always had to think logically, and had to being able to prove his theory as fact. He just wanted to be able to think of something, and not have to prove its factuality. Besides, even if it was possible believable, his mentors would just shut down the philosophy. It was uncommon, and disgraceful for a student to be more intelligent than a mentor, but Shadrach was an uncommon boy.

His thoughts, his dreams, were more complex and more intriguing than anything his mentors could have ever thought up, and Shadrach himself knew this to be fact. But he would never admit to this; if he was to say he knew more then his mentors, he would be considered dishonorable, and shunned from his colony. And the last thing he needed on his plate was to be shunned, as he was already known as “that insane child who believes in alien life”.

Shadrach had finally reached his small apartment, on the outskirts of his colony’s town. He unlocked his door, went up the stairs, and walked into his apartment. Shadrach also live alone; always kept under the watch of his mentors (Shadrach didn’t know how they watched him from his apartment, but they did), he had been granted the freedom of living by himself in his own apartment. This was usually rare, but with Shadrach’s improved grades, and his lack of parental supervision, his mentors had thought it would be acceptable to allow him to live alone in his own apartment.

Graciously, Shadrach had accepted this gift, and now lived alone in his own apartment, the way he would want to live anyway. He didn’t need roommates, or parents, for that matter. All he needed was a bed and a mini-fridge, and he would be able to make it to the next day. He turned on the radio to see if anything important was happening, but, as usual, an advert was playing for removal of termites. “Typical,” Shadrach said aloud. It seemed these days news was scarce, and the only trustworthy source was your gut.

Money, that’s all they want, though Shadrach. Greedy bastards, advertising up to the minute news, but then playing jingles for lawn care, or erectile dysfunction. The last time erectile dysfunction was even a common thing in his colony was centuries ago. But it didn’t matter; they’d do whatever they needed to do, as long as they had riches by the end of it all.

Shadrach continued to his fridge, and took out a soda. Hs throat needed it: he had nothing to drink since he had gone out to explore the cosmos. Shadrach then proceeded to lie down on his bed, and take out a book. It was one that his mentors had given to him, saying they had no history of it whatsoever. Rumors say the book fell out of the sky one day, with a torn cover, so the author was anonymous.  Nonetheless, Shadrach thought the least he could do was open it and see what it was about.

He read the first section:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.’

Shadrach began to contemplate this. Was it common when this was written to invade a person’s privacy, and knock on their doors at odd hours of the night? As he read on, it confused him more, as the guest who was visiting wasn’t a citizen, but rather, a raven. What was a raven? The entire piece confused him, and he realized it was too early to try to decipher what this author meant by his writing, so he placed the book back.

Though still early, the sun had raised itself upward, and the colony had begun to awake. Citizens went off to work, and the children played in the alleyways. Shadrach remembered that his mentoring was pushed back until later in the day due to unknown circumstances, and he could go back to sleep for a few hours.

Taking the opportunity, he laid upon his bed, and drifted into his own world, where he was a hero, where he was right, where constellations were discovered, and Shadrach’s theories could be proven logically. Alas, it was only a fantasy. But what a fantasy it was. Shadrach eventually fell asleep, silently thinking of the book, and hoping no one would interrupt his sleep by knocking on his door.