Crescendo

Chapter 1: Symphony

When you enter the world, no one bothers to tell you how insignificant you are. You're always "Mommy's special baby," or "Dad's favorite kid." They don't tell you that, compared to the Earth you inhabit, your small body and its short existence is like a blip on a heart monitor: to be expected, nothing to get worked up about. Your life, while predictable, is not spectacular.

I know this is incredibly nihilistic and harsh. I mean, coming to terms with one's own insignificance is rarely a task done with excitement. But I feel like it's important to understand how small our time on this Earth is, because if we don't recognize how fast the world is moving beneath our feet, we might lose our footing and never make up for the ground we lost. We will be lost in the sweeping tides of time, swallowed whole by our inability to act courageously.

I wish I was courageous.

- - -

The bell trills harshly in my ear as chairs scrape against hard tile floor, accompanied by the hum of the cold flourescent lights above. It's cold in the science lab today, my knuckles as white as the plaster that coats the walls of the classroom. I am dropped back into my seat, and reality, by the cacophony of manmade noise surrounding me. I stand and shove my notebook into my backpack, struggling to fit it in between the explosion of folders, spiral notebooks, and loose papers. I force it in somewhere between my Calculus book and my laptop, zip up my backpack, and sling it onto my back. I slump with the weight of my bag, thinking There's a metaphor here somewhere.

I weave between the crowd of students flooding toward the doorway as I untangle my earbuds in my hoodie pocket. I brush shoulders with my classmates and wiggle my way through the door, then turn to the right and walk to the staircase, plugging my earbuds into my phone and hitting "Shuffle." I pop one earbud into my ear as I half skip, half jog down the stairs. Music floods my brain, and a calm washes over me. Finally, a sound I like.

I walk down the halls, my brain relieved from the clashing sounds of the school around me, and soothed by the driving beats and guitar licks in my ear. I don't know what it is about music, but it's like putting aloe on a sunburn to me. In a world of grinding machinery and screeching rubber soles on tile, music is like a breath that fills your lungs and leaves your head spinning a little.

The electronic clock that hangs over my locker flashes 3:40 AM, which is exactly what it's done every day that I've gone to my school. None of the clocks in the school can seem to agree on what time it is, some just a few minutes fast or slow, and some a whole 16 hours ahead, like the clock above my locker.

I let my backpack fall off of my shoulder and onto the floor as I undo the lock on my locker and open the door. I grab my lunchbox and swap out the Calculus book in my bag with an even heavier AP Psych book. When I finish zipping up my backpack, I swing it up back onto my shoulder, lock my locker, and head back down the hall to sit on the bench by the window.

I sit with a group of people that I'm borderline acquiantances with. It's not that we don't like each other or we don't get along, we just have so little in common that we rarely make conversation. In fact, there's really only one thing that's similar between the four of us: We're all incredibly lonely.

Samuel is the first to sit down after me. He's a gangly redhead, skinny as a toothpick and even paler than I am. He's covered in freckles, even on the eyelids that always droop over his blue eyes. He's always tired, sporting dark circles under his eyes like they're eye shadow or mascara. He talks the least out of the four of us, always napping, eating, or typing on his computer. Really the only things we know about him are his name, his favorite food (ham and cheese sandwiches), and that he's writing a sci-fi romance saga titled "Moonbeams" in his spare time. From what he said about it, it honestly sounds pretty good. He even said he'd let me buy the first copy.