Inkless

Summer is coming to a close – the last summer that is truely free. Soon it will morph into that half-wit season that adults feel when they know to put their sports jacket into the closet for safekeeping. Work is ending soon. Recruiting season is coming up. BCG, McKinsey, Bain, Accenture … we all know the names we are going to court. We will worry about how many bullet points are on our resumes and the decimals in our GPAs. Those meant to slave away at their deliverables will salivate at the thought of five zeros and a lonely apartment. Still, many more will look at them with both jealousy and contempt.

I wonder which group, if any, I will fall under. My credentials are certainly not the creme of the crop but I dare say in a recess game of “crack the case,” I wouldn’t be that last kid nervously looking at his friends split into teams.

More importantly, I continue to wonder if this is the right way to go. I am adamant that this is merely another stepping stone towards a more fufilling career. However, if the money does start coming in and the bills start mounting, I wonder if this is a cycle that is breakable. I always ask myself why I chase this field filled with pompous elitists parading their firm’s title before their own names. I always thought of myself as someone outside of that inner circle – one in it for the experience and not the money. Hell, I really don’t know anymore.

Maybe it’s the challenge or the success. Or just proving to myself I can do this without the selling of the soul. Whatever it is, it will manifest itself this coming semester.

I recently went back to the City with a couple of high school friends and found something that deeply affected me. We found a hill I used to find myself at many-an-afternoon in elementary school. The stairway, which used to be hidden behind a sneaky tree was now fully exposed – adorned in mosaic tile placed by residents. At the peak however, the view was left unchanged. It was the concrete jungle of the sunset, the place I grew up, the place which made me the independent, grimy little kid I still am today. Nothing was different. It was the same cool fog rolling down the streets. The same little cars zooming down 19th swishing by the alphabetized corridors. In the distance, the Pacific stood as it did years and years ago, steady, stable and a reminder that only you are different.

While my friends talked about the day, I thought about my memories on that hill. That same brittle green bench with the paint peeling off. The same sandy hill with those trees that looked like people hung from them. When we were kids, did all this feel the same? We were invincible back then, not-yet-teens talking about life while stooped atop this hill. We felt godlike watching the world move under us.

On that hill, I remembered my most vivid memories from childhood again. Recess,  Kindergarten, a boy pushed you aside to get to a red rubber ball. I pushed him again to get it back for you. You thank me and go on your merry way. We were children. There was no affection, simply friendship. Go forwards a few years and we’ve grown. Pretending to be giants on a small tarmac playground. I saw that picture of us posing once. You’ve most definitely forgotten by now. But I have it, and it exemplifies everything we were and who we thought we would become.

Playing handball in your garage, the ball going BOOM, BOOM against the door, rumbling our eardrums. In that cacophony, you told me you wanted to do something good when you grew up. You said your sister was going to become a doctor and save people’s lives. You were going to be bigger and better.  I know you’ve forgotten this, but I’m sure it motivated you as you grew up.

At the mere age of ten, we were social idealists. We thought we could change the whole damn city if it started with our school. We investigated the world and defined our values. We realized it was not as easy as the books and movies made it out to be. As children, we felt so limited by what could be done. We organized food and clothing drives. We fundraised to support our school and library. We did what we could do. The grownups were sure impressed. They thought it was cute. What the hell did they know about how disproportionate our dreams were to our reality.

We were sure strange kids. One hell of a childhood you would tell me years later. I could not agree more. To know there is another out there who went through the same strange, exhilarating and humbling process made my life seem so much more purposeful.

When I moved from you and everyone else, I was crushed for years. We never had feeling for each other beyond the platonic kind, but I felt I loss so much more than my friend. Sure, we were starting to realize a boy and  girl could not stay close friends in a social riot like middle school, but the us-vs-the world mentality was still there. It was not only you. It was the entire situation. We lived in a setting where we grew up quick and eagerly awaited for the license to create change. Our friends admired us for those features – nothing else.

When I moved away, I felt transplanted into a hopelessly stubborn and stupid world. Immediately, I felt years older than my peers. They resembled the kids we would see going crazy over the sight of pigeons in the city. The ones who would pout and cry at Toys R Us while we went there only to admire. We had our damn playthings. We just didn’t own them.

For years, my world felt limited, pointless and lonely. I pleaded night after night to go home. I offered everything. A friend offered me a place to stay, I could work at 14. I was willing to do anything. Then a quick parental lie about a filled registration and a night of running away left me with absolutely nothing – not even the blindest and most foolish of hopes. I accepted it in the end, and you all knew it.

Then i heard how you all grew up. Like me really, with the school dances, the petty kid-like relationships, the childhood dramas. I thought we had both lost it. But slowly and surely, I begin to hear good things about you from friends and I knew your motivation wasn’t all gone. You were still set to change the world, in an ever more realist fashion. I however, was still stuck dead in the water.

At our reunion almost ten years afterwards, you were so very different. Busy, adult, beautiful and cold. No more was the girl I knew in my head. That girl I got hit in the face for was really gone. When you hugged me, it was so anticlimatic. I had missed you for eight years. At that time, you were still in the back of my head. Those memories of a better place still etched in behind the wall I had built-up to deal with the daily humdrum. But that hug was so calculated, so manneristic. You respectfully addressed my parents and proceeded to mingle as if this were a VC wine mixer. You came by later on to ask about me and as soon as some others made a stupid joke about “how we were too close,” you shied away. You left before I could talk to you again. Eight years. You did not change in the first four. What happened in the next? I know you remember our childhood, maybe not as vivdly, but surely as potently.

Then a year later, I meet you in a restaurant by chance. You are there with your family and your boyfriend. Stanford-type. Silent, passive, yours. Your mother remembered me warmly. Commented on how I had become a young man. Your boyfriend looked at me as if I were someone to worry about. Once again, that mastered small-talk and you’re off.

We both had success strewn into our childhoods. Even derailed, I will continue to strive. You’ve taken your path and reaped the rewards. One of the top in the nation. Elite. However, you seem to have forgotten our childhood. When we found ourselves sitting down and talking, what did we say about the future? Surely, it was not to settle, it was not to find the end of the road and coast along. After the last and probably ever time I would ever see you, I was quite devastated. In my mind, I had the image of someone working for the same impossiblities as I did, the same lofty ambitions. And when I finally saw who you had become, I did not understand. Is it the fate of the idealistic to succumb to realism? Is it always?

I’m sure you will live a great life but there was simply so much more. I think I will always remember the old you, the child. You know, the one who asked me if I was Christian or Catholic as if those were the only two possibilites in the world. That girl that cried less than the boys and the only one who wrote with the same maturity as a child as myself. The one who influenced me to go big or go home. The one who believed that I could beat that other candidate and the one who rubbed her free lunch stamp on my wrist when I forgot. The girl who set the bar for the ones I have loved afterward and the one who taught me so much.

You probably have forgotten most of all this. You have pushed it away. You would stand on Turtle Hill and see it differently than I. You would see the concrete jungle of the sunset and admire the beauty. But you would forget why it was so beautiful. It is not just the red and orange dribble of sunlight fading, but the years and years we grew up in its midst.

It’s okay, I will remember for the both of us.

Good luck.

‘Tis All.