I just want to go home. Like in that Beach Boys song, “Sloop John B.” That song almost made me cry once when I was younger. It’s probably because I’ve never really felt at home in any particular house I’ve lived in. Or maybe it’s because I miss the first house I lived in, and I can’t remember what it was like. In any case I have this sick, empty feeling in my gut and it’s not because of hunger. I mean, I’m pretty comfortable where I live now. It’s a bit lonely at times, but that’s usually because I don’t want to go back to my parents’ house and I end up alone with nothing to do. So now we’ve come to the real problem: I am alone. No girlfriend, cat, goldfish, or sea monkey at my side for me to pet. Here comes that feeling again. Maybe I should get a bagel.

What the hell is wrong with me?
   
To answer this question I would need to address its brothers and sisters: why don’t I have a girlfriend yet, why don’t I have a job yet, why don’t I have a car yet, and why can’t I perfectly mimic the “Eruption” guitar solo of Eddie Van Halen yet? My life’s failings are strewn out before me like small posters featuring the snide faces of my inner demons. If there is a God, which I think there might be, he must be laughing his socks off at me. I don’t think He or I could ever explain my prolonged awkwardness. All I get to do is stew in its murky texture and wish for change.
   
This is getting too personal. Something needs to happen, but it can’t because I’m sitting here typing the end of this first page and the story has caught up with me. I don’t want to venture to write my own fictional future because I would either be too depressed if it didn’t come true or too depressed if it did. So the obvious conclusion is that I need to go back in time–like Huey Lewis & the News.

“You have just been born,” the man in white said to me. “If you think this is a mistake we can incubate you for up to one additional week, but you will need to appeal to the hospital for further time after that. Well, how do you feel?”
   
“Ba. Ga, ba ahaa,” I stammered.

“Oh–how could I forget? Infants do not know how to speak our language until injected with the proper chemicals. I apologize, sir.”

At this time I was aware of three things: I was cold, I was a sir, and I was being injected with a small syringe filled with translucent blue liquid.

“This is a fifth grade education. It will sustain you up to the time you decide to go to college,” said the doctor, removing the needle.
   
I looked at the doctor, utterly dumbfounded.
   
“Pah! That’s merely a joke we like to play on the newborns here at the hospital. That injection was your booster shot, my friend. And if you will look behind you I think you will be glad to find your mother.”
  
I turned around and saw an exhausted woman half smiling at me. Her hair was the color of well-done peanut butter cookies, and her eyes were the color of the sky at five o’clock on a Friday in Spring when the sun has gathered all the clouds in the sky to use as his pillow. She held a blanket which she wrapped me in carefully, then began to speak.
  
“Hello, son. I’m so glad to see you,” she said. At this moment she kissed me on the forehead and I was more happy than I would be at any future point in my life as far as I know today.

One year later I awoke to the wetness and squishyness of the lukewarm afternoon. I was abruptly in a mood for adventure, but something felt wrong about my person. As I pondered this, the metaphorical squishyness proved to be indeed rooted in reality in that I had soiled myself. Upon sitting up I felt the most vile and irritating substance crawl up my groin. Lacking the proper motor skills to remedy the situation at the time, I had no choice but to bawl. In one and a half instances the angelic form of my mother dashed into the room and swept me up in her arms. For a moment I was calm, and then the angel realized why I had been crying and held me out from her, like a diseased cat. I began to whimper again as she led me to the changing table, but a soft barrage of shh shh shhhh pacified me and I slipped into ignorance and bliss.
    My inability to speak or to act with purpose in the matters of physical labor left me with so few options. I had hardly anything to do, and in this simplicity I was contained within a few pleasures. The world was at my fingertips, but my fingers were not yet equipped for handling such devices as the world so I was content in blowing spit bubbles for an hour, crawling in a radius of two meters for another hour, and playing with blocks and refrigerator magnet letters for the last hour. Then I would sleep. This process would repeat itself until I gained the ability to speak. Once that happened, my life would inevitably plunge down a steep hill with death meeting me at the bottom.

Some time later I unknowingly procured this speaking ability. I, of course, was not able to express the fullest extent of my emotions, but I could form words nonetheless.

When my father asked me, “Can you say ‘dad-dy’?” my limitations on speech led me to answer with a profound, “No.”

This kept my father and I entertained for about thirteen minutes. He then decided to pay tribute to the glowing TV in front of the couch, and I was alone. On the floor in my diaper and dirty shirt, I reached toward the heavens in hopes that my angelic mother would raise me to a respectable and dignified height. She was not there. Hanging my head, I discovered a bright red stain on my shirt. I could not resist the vibrancy of the color; it was more enticing than anything I had witnessed in my life. I pulled up my shirt and began to suck on the red stain. Discovering that it merely tasted faintly of spaghettios and shirt, I neglected further exploration of the shirt stain.

With my nearly two years of experience, I had become bored with spit bubbles. This led me to seek out forms of entertainment not attached to myself. I took up crawling due to my limited choice in transportation. I waddled across the floor into the kitchen, feeling the freshly mopped floor with my young and impressionable fingers. I had experienced the floor before, though, so I kept moving. I spotted a cabinet door just off the floor that was slightly ajar. Upon opening it further, I saw a dull glass tub of some amber colored honey. I was about to move on when I spotted the bright red lid of the jar. Although I had just had a less than exciting experience with the color red, my gut told me that it still had potential. I reached for the lid. Slowly, as I pulled one side of the lid with both of my tiny hands, the jar tilted toward me and the lid began to slip free. I was instantly overcome with a new feeling, one of pure fear. I hobbled away as fast as I could, the lid finally squelching free of the jar. The glass behemoth crashed to floor, inches from my fragile feet. A single crack decorated the side of the jar as torrents of sweet amber clutched at me.

I was about to protest to this awful clingy mess and its dull appearance splattered across my beautiful physique when another of my senses called my attention to the character of this sweet honey. It smelled so sweet that the sensation forced my hand directly into my mouth, where an explosion of taste sent me into a euphoric state of consciousness.

“Oh! DEAR!?” shouted my mother as she spied my smiling, sticky body.

That experience had been ruined by an angry exchange of words between my mother and father. The noise disturbed me, and made me wary of many kinds of exploration¾but not exploration of the mind. I began to rapidly progress in block engineering, the science of walking, beach ball physics, and tooth brushing technique. After discovering how to brush the “backside” of my few and tiny teeth one night, I climbed into bed wholly victorious in my ventures through the arts and sciences of life. My mother read me a short story and kissed me goodnight.
   
I crawled out of the green earth and found myself in a lush field. Before me stood an enormous obelisk of pearlescent blue. At its peak were thousands of tiny spires of white pointing in one direction. I stood and walked away from the shining tower to gain a better view of its beauty. As I walked, I saw the sun flicker on the grass and a faded shadow started to grow and become darker. I turned just in time to see a giant toothbrush crashing down upon me.
   
I woke to the sound of silence. The refrigerator and far off rumbles of vehicles mixed with one or two ticking clocks to create the symphony of my sleeping room. Yet the symphony must have been written during the expressionistic period because the dissonance and atonality of it all drove me to get out of bed in frustration. I went to the bathroom for a sip of water in my small, cupped hands.
   
When I returned to my room I shut off the light, drowning the room in darkness. I had never been in the position to view my room in such a way. My mother would always turn off the light just as I was drifting off to sleep. The corners of things and angles that the dark shadows made on the walls fascinated and frightened me. I slowly moseyed to my bed when I noticed my closet door straight across from where I stood. The door hung a few inches away from the jamb, spilling an eerie darkness around its edges. As my eyes adjusted to the light, the darkness grew in its contrast to the rest of my room. A twisted and lumpy figure stood silently inside of the closet, barely in view. I could only assume it was some variety of demon sent from hell to slay me while I slept. It simply sat there in wait, pretending not to exist.
   
I shakily stood, half-deciding to put this demon back where it came from. I happened to know that demons cannot exist in the light, so I made my way to the light switch on the wall. Every step I took revealed more of the inside of my closet, affirming my vision of the demonic silhouette. Its hair fell in large, long clumps and lay on the ground at its round and tiny feet. Its body was a single mass, squared and bulky with no extra appendages. I was three feet away from the light switch when I saw the demon twitch. We stared at each other in the darkness, neither daring to fulfill his task in fear that the other would fulfill his first. I bit my lip and leaped at my wall, dragging my hand up on the switch as I fell. I peered into the closet to see my mother’s vacuum cleaner in a tangled heap. I let out a breath of relief, turned the light off, and went back to sleep.

I sat in a plastic chair, wholly content with life aside from missing my two front teeth. A piece of newspaper stretched out in front of me. They wanted me to somehow transform the lifeless piece of gray matter into a delightful sombrero. I nearly protested, wanting to mention that some other students had made more than one already, but I resisted the temptation.
   
I began to fold the corners and sides and manipulate the paper just the way I had seen. When I turned it over, the entire wad collapsed and splayed out before me again just as it had been before, only slightly more wrinkled now. I took a calming breath and proceeded to go through the motions again. The paper refused to bend to my will, and in frustration I smashed the whole business up and threw it against a wall. Now I was pissed.
   
To my dismay, the teacher did not indulge in my display for attention, but merely lay another piece of newspaper before me and calmly encouraged me to keep trying. I hardly saw the point. Paper folding was obviously entirely out of my reach at that point, so why continue pretending I will ever succeed in the practice? Not only would continuation of this charade waste time, it would surely cause my self-esteem to plummet, and at such an impressionable age of five I could easily succumb to depression and perhaps attempt suicide.
   
Nonetheless, my hand was forced. I watched closely each step in the process of making this ridiculous hat, and mimicked the motions meticulously. To my awe and joy I somehow created a magnificent triangular masterpiece that I would wear for the rest of that day. I held it up to the light in sheer amazement at my raw talent. The edges of the hat seemed to glow in the incandescent light of the pre-school building.
   
During recess I displayed the hat proudly upon my golden locks as I strutted towards the slide and jungle gym. The other children had their sad excuses for headwear as well, and I clearly saw several of them stop in their tracks and gawk at my shining example of craftsmanship.
   
One of the boys that had finished early was sliding down the gigantic robin’s egg blue slide. He gained such velocity that his oblong head fixture blew off his head and fell in the mud. He barely noticed, running off to play T-ball with everyone. I stood there as all the others ran off to the field, several dropping their hats and none caring at all. The hats all lay dying on the ground around me. The wind swelled and blew my own hat off as I began to slowly walk away.

I walked into my room. The walls were entirely white, the closet was empty, and all my stuff was gone. The window still had curtains, and the bright afternoon light glowed behind them in wait, casting a dim yellow mood about the vacant room.
   
My life thus far, or what I thought comprised my life, was packed up in boxes and ready to be sent to our new home. Yet, as I knelt in this room that felt so much bigger with everything gone, I wished I could take the room with me. I was going to miss it.
   
I looked out of the car window at the house as we drove away and said goodbye.

That summer I began perfecting the practice of slumping. First my spine adjusted to my new, soft bed as I stretched my legs out towards my TV. With my head propped up against the backboard, my jaw sagged slightly. My eyes were almost at half-focus when my dad barged in.
   
“Go outside,” he said, leaning against the door jamb.
   
But… Rugrats.
   
“You’ll become a rugrat if you sit inside all summer–now go on and play outside.”
   
I don’t know what that means.
   
“One… two… three… four…”
   
To this day I have not figured out what comes after five. The knowledge is not worth what the actual consequence could turn out to be. Thus, I found myself walking towards the park. For a park, it was extremely lacking in things to do. Or at least in safe things to do. If I actually wanted to hang on rusty rings six yards from the ground I think I might be putting too much trust in my parents’ health insurance.
   
I quickly made it through the park and into a rather dirty and complicated path. I couldn’t see how this benefited me in any way. The real world is much less vibrant than television makes it out to be. That’s why it’s more fun to watch it than to experience it firsthand. I came upon a pool of water that must have lead to a creek. I could hear running water in the distance, but the pool was not running anywhere. Yellow foam and a Pepsi bottle stood still on the surface of the water. I walked away in disgust.
   
Deeper into the maze I dodged huge masses of green growth. The plant was so green, yet so sticky and prickly that it almost hurt to touch it. I emerged to find a small trickle of water running through the grass and mud. There was a solitary plank of wood acting as a bridge supported by some rocks and pebbles. The flow of water was so thin, though, that one hardly needed a bridge. I spied a white stone amongst the gray and brown ones and scurried over to it. Bits of dirt were nestled in the small grooves on its exterior, and I knelt next to the water to clean it off. I began to notice the beauty all around me… the cloudy sunlight gleaming through the tree leaves, the grass and moss crawling towards the water, the reflections of light on the surface of the white stone. All seemed to be calm with the world in this place.
   
I spied another stone a few feet away and was dismayed to find that my feet would not move. It seems the mud was thicker than I had first judged, and my boots were now entirely encased in the muck. I put my weight on my left leg, and my right boot nearly slipped off. I then clenched my toes and yanked my right leg free. A mass of brown clung to the boot weighing it down significantly. The pebbly shore was close enough that I could rest my right foot in a safe spot. My left boot had sunk in a bit more, however, and the same technique would not make it budge. I tried for a few minutes to yank it free with my leg, but stuck it remained and my leg was getting tired. The creek, it seemed, did not want me to go.
   
I knew my only option now was to sacrifice my clean sock and abandon the boot until I could go get help. I said goodbye to my boot and hobbled out of the creek, dirtying my sock with every step.