Alone With You Somehow

Alone With You Somehow Chapter 1

It was the last commencement speech.

8:36 PM.

That is when he changed.

Clayton shifted on the metal foldout chair then reached up and adjusted his tie. The idea of his old life had become a raft untied and it was floating away as he watched.

He had been a man of habit up until that moment. Excruciating habit. Clayton was a high school teacher. As such, with effort, he could adjust his days not just to the hour but often to the minute, and on days when he was especially good, to the second. The thrill of a bell going off hour-by-hour, marking the shift of students - a sea of youth - swelling and receding into and out of his classroom, years could advance and pass in a blur.

Do this at this time.

Do that at that time.

Clayton had made lists he tallied every day, checking off to-dos like sentries with sniper bullets. All of them. Every item on every list. Every day.

Until that moment.

A paradigm change.

All of a sudden Clayton saw not only the repetition in the valedictorian's words, the dreadful, unvaried quality to her thoughts, he saw the rigid line he himself had trod. Not the entirety of his life. Not even the majority. But it was like he had been asleep. A minor Van Winkle, surely, but for five, maybe six years he had walked a singular path, living as a different man than he had been in his youth, and all this time not seeing it.

What had happened?

The valedictorian's words droned on in vacuous sameness and Clayton stared at the empty space over her head, cataloguing the sameness in his own life. Yet, there was also a feeling of preparation in him, a sense that his half-conscious life had been a seed waiting for Spring, not a barren row of forgotten soil. This night was an event on the horizon, a planned-for event on some list he did not remember making.

He sat up straight and scanned the audience.

The same segregation existed that always did in high school gyms in early June. Teachers on a far side watching seniors en mass fidget in the center and an audience of bored relatives in the bleachers.

On the floor there was camaraderie, not between but among both teachers and students comprising a miniature, two-party system. Students yawned and giggled, held whispered conversations, put finishing touches on pranks they hoped to pull when the principle handed them their diploma. The teachers, for their part, did much the same thing, minus the planned pranks. There were the quiet guffaws or disparaging, dry remarks about who had actually done enough to make the walk. There was the ever-popular game of trying to match student to parent in the audience, which was often as easy as drawing chalk lines around the deceased.

That is when he saw her.

A woman.

Only that. A woman. She should have blended in with the rest of the unrecognized, but for some reason she stood out like a neon sign. She was beautiful, that was something to set her apart, but not in an aggressive way, not in a way that normally catapulted a woman to the front of the line. She wasn't even brunette, which he had at one time preferred before descending into this world of lists and penciled check marks. My god, when was the last time I lusted after a woman?

She had pale hair, thin and straight though it did curve enough to frame her face. She herself was slender, lithesome, and even from a distance he could see that her eyes were stunning. Light, bordering on silver, almost luminous.