Wings of Butterflies

6. The Terror of Knowing

Part Two – Marc

When my eyes opened, I felt my heart thumping hard inside my bare chest. What a strange dream! It bothered me that I didn’t recall what it was about. All I knew was that I had a difficult time letting the feeling of distress go. I reached out to turn on the light on the right side of my bed, but there was nothing. My hand was fumbling in thin air. That’s odd. My brain worked very slowly and it took a while before I put all the pieces together.

     Though I had been away at college for almost three months now, I still couldn’t get adjusted to some things. Like I could wake up in the middle of the night, 4:13 to be exact, and forget that I wasn’t at home in Newberry anymore. Sometimes I didn’t understand how I had got the guts to fly more than 2000 miles away from home. Two thousand miles. A shock came over me and I suddenly grasped the fact that I was so far away from everything I knew and loved. Well, maybe not everything I cared about was on the other side of the country.

     When I let my head wonder to tomorrow’s classes, I closed my eyes and waited for sleep to come again. A thousand different thoughts ran through my mind and when the black alarm clock on the small nightstand showed 5:07, I couldn’t take it anymore. As quiet as possible I reached for my white and blue NIKE sneakers and my grey jumper. When I walked across the pine floor, Peter abruptly stopped snoring and sat straight up in his bed. He looked into my eyes and made an angry pout with his mouth. 

     “No mom, I’m not wearing that to the family reunion!” he shouted out and then fell back on his pillow. 

     I stared at my roommate and couldn’t help to smile at his little outburst. This was something that I would torture him with for a long time to come. As the time at The College had passed, I realized that I had become more and more fond of my roommate. If the next coming four years would keep on being this entertaining, I was in for a blast.

     Peter was a hippie like guy with hair down to his shoulders, who I probably never would have hung out with normally. In a random conversation about politics, he had mentioned briefly that his father was the governor of Florida. I was stunned and didn’t know what to reply to a statement like that. No one of my friends in Newberry had parents with impressive jobs. The only one I could recall with a job with some shred of status was a mother to a girl in my class who was the manager of the local Target store. I guess that’s one con with growing up in a small town. You never got the chance to know someone with influence.

     “Just don’t think about it. I don’t”, was everything Peter said about his ground-breaking news before rambling on about his thoughts about the war in Iraq.

     It was after that conversation that I really started to like Peter. How lightly he spoke about his father’s success, all the money and the fancy parties. Like it didn’t matter at all. With his rich upbringing, it was a miracle that he had stayed so down-to-earth. But I figured that it had a lot to do with the friends that he had met in high school. When he talked about them, there was a whole other expression on his face compared to when he spoke about his family. I never shared my thoughts with Peter, but I figured that his hippie friends were more like a family to him than his blood family, who never did understand how Peter could take a step back from their world.

A few minutes later I was jogging down a trail I myself had found during one of my daily exercises. It was perfect for my morning run because there were rarely other people there, so all I heard was my iPod shuffle blasting in my ears, and if I was my usual self, it would barely take me 30 minutes to get back to campus. And today was truly a great day. My legs felt light as feathers and the remaining parts of my body were rested even though my sleep had been interrupted. The only thing consuming my mind at the moment were the tones from Start me up and of course; her. She was the one who had convinced me to give The Rolling Stones a chance and now I was hooked.