He was deep in thought. I knew it because he was holding the eraser of his pencil against his forehead, just like he always did when he had the weight of the world on his mind.

“I don’t know,” I began. A promising start. “It just seems that sometimes I feel like I’m going straight forward, like nothing can stop me from getting where I want to be and I’m going a hundred miles an hour or close to it. Everything goes right, you know?”

He didn’t move, not a muscle. No indication that he’d heard me. I continued.

“And then, it’s like a wind comes. A crazy strong wind, like that gale force wind that closed school that one day last year, remember? Or even like the winds in a hurricane that move cars and crush houses and shit, I don’t know, it just…” I stopped. I knew he was listening by this point but I wasn’t going to continue unless he showed some active engagement in the listening role. It was a routine we had figured out years ago and I wasn’t about to let him deviate from it.

He lowered the pencil a bit and raised his eyes to look into mine. “It just what?” He spoke the words clearly, slowly, in opposition to my jumbled, rushed torrents of thought. His weighted speech, his stubborn insistence on giving one or two word replies to every question was a thorn in my side ordinarily, but when I couldn’t stop worrying and my brain was spinning around, his few words became an anchor for my cognition, a port in the storm. His mind raged just as fiercely as mine did, but the difference was that I was outside on the beach, letting the breakers crash over me, feeling the rain and wind rip into my skin, and he was sitting inside in the warmth of the house with a mug of tea by the fire, feeling the same.

He lowered his head again and held the pencil between the palms of his hands. I knew he was really listening now and felt comfortable enough to continue. “And it just pushes me off course, like…I’m still going in the right direction, I can still see where I want to be and what I want to be doing, but I can’t quite get there, my mind won’t let me because I get scared and nervous and the wind becomes all I can think about.”

“What does it feel like?”

“What does it feel li—shit, I don’t know what it feels like. Like wind, like a really strong wind that just pushes and pushes and pushes and takes over everything. Like when you’re outside on a windy day and the sun is shining and the birds are out and everything’s beautiful, as it should be, but then it starts getting windy and the newspapers start flapping up everywhere and people can’t keep their hats on and shopping carts crash into cars and everyone gets nervous and edgy. It’s like that, except it’s all going on inside my head and I can’t figure out a way to stop it and I’m the only one who even can, and then I just get mad at myself.”

I stopped suddenly, feeling out of breath and slightly lightheaded. Rising from the chair, I thrust my hands into my pockets, feeling around for lint. My heart pounded through my chest. I didn’t know why, I could not stop it. “It’s like…I’m in control but I’m really not, there’s something out there that’s blocking me from doing everything. And the saddest part is, I can see it all, I have it all planned, everything is perfect, perfect, you know? Like, school, work, I have a great job, I have this big house and a car and a lot of friends and I stopped smoking, and I know that it’s all there, it’s all going to happen, but fuck. I just…it’s there but it’s not, you know?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet, not now, not ever for all I know. It’s fucking awful not knowing what’s going to happen, or even knowing and not being able to make it happen.”

He lifted the pencil back up to his forehead, his brows knitted together. Outwardly, he was serene, disinterested, even detached, like he wasn’t really in the room. Inside I knew he was frothing and seething as much as I was. It was why I felt I could tell him these things, these thoughts because he felt them too. He could balance me out and together we could get rid of them.

I continued, still struggling to catch my breath, the thudding of my heartbeat echoing though my body. “And maybe, maybe, who knows, maybe I’ll get to where I want to be and realize it’s wrong, it’s not what I wanted at all and then I’ll be stuck and I’ll see the wrong turn I made, the place I did something and should have done something else and then I’ll regret it and never be able to look back without being sad and angry. I don’t want to be one of those people, I’m not one of those people.”

“Not yet.”

“No, not yet, and not ever. I hate those people. They’re my parents and your parents and everyone who was too scared to make a fucking choice and commit to something great and beautiful and do something for the love of it. I want to do something I love and love it and that’s all I’ll ever be able to think about and it will fill everything up, all the bad shit and the lonely times I’ll ever have. I don’t know what it is and I don’t know why I’m so worked up right now, but I have to find it.”

He looked up at me again, into my eyes, and then lowered his gaze a bit, maybe staring at the wall behind me or the pattern on the carpet, seeing me without looking at me. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

Stephen Boyd is a senior English major and Senior Editor of Generation.