Light #3

The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment. It turned out to be not so much the anticipated bright and shining exit into fulfillment, but the entrance to a different kind of darkness. Not Milton’s “darkness made visible,” nothing as hellish as that. The grey let-down of a lesser enlightenment into the fact that the end of the tunnel that had been funneling him claustrophobically towards its glow in the distance just extended that same highway to a point where it disappeared around a bend and over a horizon. Out here was not “there,” not the destination, but a different milestone of a never-ending getting there. 

That was not why Eric had put so many years into perfecting himself, honing his technique, polishing his delivery. Shining his shoes. At least, it was not why he thought he had been doing it. He had just wanted to get finished with all that preparation for being a fully realized, participatory grown-up when he hit eighteen. But the nineteen-year-olds were still that tiny bit ahead of him they had been last year as eighteen-year-olds. And the twenty-eight-year-olds who had been eighteen when he was looking up to them when he was eight? Now solid. Respectable. Mortgaged. Parents. And none of them seemed very impressed by his arrival--not enough to look behind to see if he might be gaining on them, much less care.

Eighteen candles on the cake laughed up at him as they melted into the lemon peppermint icing that had been his favorite about one year too long. One by one they puddled and extinguished. "Happy fucking birthday to me," he grumbled. His first adult curse. 

He shrugged.

He stuffed in a couple of extra clips for his 9mm in his bookbag. 

"Not so much for them...."