Something about September

Something about September makes me feel like a cloud.

Well, not so much like a cloud as feeling like I'm in a cloud.

And I'll watch the office for 6 hours on a Saturday and then Elmer will call me and be all "Summer's over," and Sally will text me and say "DUDE it's dark outside!!" because they know they have to tell me these things or else I won't ever look out a window.

I like the word September. It makes me think of rotten crab apples on the way home from school and almost killing Quoc and sitting outside with my dog and dead grass and lost hope.

But whenever something smells like lost hope, I try and smile and pretend that what lost hope really is is a found hope- a hope of snow- and what I tell myself snow means is that I can wear a big jacket all day so no one will see how scrawny I am and I can fall onto the ground and not get hurt and nothing can ever touch me. And that the cold outside makes the inside warmer.

And there can be fire inside a house and nobody can get hurt because of it, which for some reason is unheard of in the summer because of all these wildfires, and you have to strip off giant boots at the backdoor and leave a puddle and watch it melt to make sure the baby doesn't eat the dirty snow, but somehow she does it anyway.

But all September means is that time is going on- or, rather, that time is staying time and I am simply riding through it, like the log ride in Portland, and looking behind me and watching the past get older and the snow start to fall.

And that I have more math homework to do.

Which I'll probably end up doing by the end of the night.

And then tomorrow in math I'll suddenly lose it and someone will go "Hey Shady, what's the answer for-" and then I'll spin around, snap a pencil over their desk, and turn back around and scribble, which usually results in silence from both friends and strangers. The only difference in their reactions is that the friends stay and watch you for a moment, and the strangers laugh and leave.

Then you lean over to your friends and whisper 'what did you get for-' and they'll lean over and dance their unbroken pencils across the paper and open your mind again to this impossible task they themselves aren't quite able to accomplish. Then, you figure out the answer and a few moments later show them.

This is the great concept of Math Class, and I hate it.