Next Stop: …
For the longest time, all Sam had ever wanted to do was break out on his own. To prove to himself and everyone else, that he did have what it takes, that he was right about himself, his dreams, his methods, and his ideas!
Sometimes it felt like the whole world told him to do it their way, even though his way made so much more sense to him. And it always made him feel wrong. Not just as though they were all telling him that he was wrong, but that he was somehow fundamentally wrong, broken, a mistake.
And that feeling took control for a while. Feeling like he knew who he was and who he would be when he grew up, he wanted to hang onto that middle ground between child and adult for a bit longer, to travel and see the world through innocent eyes. But he was told he needed to be smart, be stable and go to university straight after high-school. So he did.
He knew that he wanted to learn about design and animation, creative writing and philosophy. He knew that he wanted to make cartoons and tell visual stories. It was how his brain was wired, it was how he dreamt and imagined and thought. But he was told he needed to understand business, so he studied business with a minor in accounting.
When he finally graduated, he knew that he needed a break from doing what he was told, he knew that it was time to go out and meet himself, to follow his own advice. But he was told that he needed to advance his career, that if he didn’t take an apprenticeship he’d lose what he’d spent so much time and effort learning. He was told it would be worth it in the end. That his hard work would eventually lead to his dreams. So he moved to the nearest medium sized city and took a desk job and prioritised his business career now, so that he could one day start his dream career later.
During the week he took the train for 27 minutes in the morning to get to work, and then walked home. Because he was told it was healthy. He cooked more often than he ordered, but he still usually ordered about once a week, which he was told was normal. On weekends he either went out with work friends or stayed in to catch up on chores and tv shows. Occasionally he went on dates, and very occasionally he got laid.
And as his career advanced, he could never shake a feeling of floating from his mind. When he dreamt, which wasn’t often, he dreamt of a raft gently drifting down a grey stream surrounded by fog. He was told it didn’t mean anything, and so he let it go and let it continue to drift away into nothingness.
As time passed he began to realise that he’d stopped noticing colour, and the vibrancy of the world around him. That in the moments when someone engaged him in conversation were the only moments he felt like he was awake, and even then not always. He told the company therapist that he felt like he was sleep walking through life with only a few moments of true consciousness. The therapist told him that it must be nice to feel so at home in his job that he could achieve such success without even being awake. He told him not to worry about it, so he didn’t.
Then, as if it had been a warning, in the middle of the night Sam rose from his bed, dressed himself and dreamily walked to the train station where he waited for the 419 train that would take him to his office. But since it was midnight and a Tuesday the train he boarded was the 420 which took him the opposite direction. Still he got off 8 stops later and walked two blocks down and one block over to where his office would have been, had he gotten on the right train.
Then he sat down in a flower pot and waited for someone to come unlock the door to the wall that wasn’t his office.
And there he stayed, mostly asleep with his eyes open to slits staring at a wall, which he saw as the front of his office. Until the sun rose and the light pierced his eyes. Blinking he realised he felt strange, and tired and cold. And then he screamed and fell backwards out of the flower pot and almost into the road.
Around him was a part of the city he’d never seen before. Buildings that look similar to his own but different, a café that could have been anywhere but wasn’t one he knew, and a wall covered in graffiti that read, “Fighting for peace is like Fucking for virginity” and under that it read, “That’s so lame.” And under that it read, “Go fuck yourself” and under that it read “Virgin!”.
Something about the bad hand writing and the adolescent argument reminded Sam of a note he’d written to himself and pinned on the ceiling over his bed as a child. It had said, in equally bad hand writing, “You do you.”
His older brother had found it and laughed at him, telling him that he was so stupid that he needed a note to remember to masturbate. He’d told his friends and spread it around his school. And it had made Sam so incredibly angry. But not because people laughed at him, not because his brother had told everyone. But because that wasn’t what it had meant. It was supposed to mean that he needed to follow his own advice, his own thinking, and he hated his brother in those moments for not letting him explain that. For not listening to him.
And now as he stared at the wall and the graffiti that same anger rushed back. The fight he’d had with himself at the time, because he couldn’t have it with his brother, replayed in his head. He re-heard all the things he’d wished he’d said at the time, but hadn’t. The fight played out in Sam’s mind and he remembered that he was somewhere in the city and needed to get home and to work. He tried to remember what had happened but all that came to mind was a raft drifting down a grey lake in fog. So he started walking down the street towards what seemed like a main road, to try find a clue to where he was.
What he found was a train station, and the 419 train. A direct line back to his normal life.
But as he sat waiting for it to arrive an idea began to form. A realisation, a clearing of the fog in his mind.
“I, can, go, anywhere.”
A woman in a dark blue pin skirt and white blouse sitting near him pulled a face and removed one of her earphones, then said.
“Sorry, what?”
He turned toward her, without really looking at her, and said.
“I can go anywhere, I … I don’t actually have to go to work, or do any of the things I’ve been told I’m supposed to do, I can do whatever I want, actually.”
A smile spread across his face, as the woman raised her eyebrows and let out a long breath saying, “Okay?” while meaning, ‘weirdo’ and put her earphone back in. But Sam didn’t care. He realised that she could also do whatever she wanted, and if that’s what she wanted, that was fine.
By the time the 419 train arrived Sam was sitting outside the coffeeshop near the graffiti taking in the sunshine and smiling at the tears which slowly ran down his cheeks. Wondering out loud.
“If I’m starting from nowhere, am I going to the next place, or going to the first place?”
Then he laughed, and smiled at the grumpy café worker who hated when people arrived before they opened, and for the first time since he started doing as he was told, Sam’s imagination started. In his mind he played out the conversation the café worker would have with themselves about starting work and people, and coffee machines. Then slowly it began to form into pictures in his mind, and suddenly, Sam remembered how to dream.