never look away

                I sit at a coffee shop. My laptop battery has the impressive lifespan of two minutes and there’s only one outlet within sight. It’s located ankle-high under a bar, three stools wide and a mirror the full length in front so you can either stare at yourself or creep on everyone who walks behind you. Never do I go for the seats where people can walk behind you. I always stick to corners, places where I can feel the comforting force of a wall against my back. When you sit against the wall it protects you from times that could have easily been avoided.

Like that time when you were in seventh grade and you sat in the fourth seat of the far left row of Mr. Taylor’s English class and Tyler sat behind you and on this particular day when you should have been sitting with the wall against your back. You wore a baggy shirt and you were leaning, slouching in your chair because that was the best way to go unseen, and Tyler grabbed the collar of your shirt, pulled it down and yelled to the class “Oh gross! Tom has back-ne!” and you wanted to pull your collar back, tight against the back of your neck but if you did that, it would just then expose your chest-ne. And this small event would stick with you throughout all of college and two years after it happened, you would get uncomfortable as your friends Tovin and Steve joked about the all the different forms of acne, concluding that the best kind would be knee-ne, and no you won’t change names for confidentiality when you recall those days because that’s what happened.

                I still sit in the back corners of classrooms. When people get bored, their eyes start to wander. You stop looking at the professor and look at the person in front of you. You look at the back of their neck, that spot where the spine slightly juts out from the skin. You notice they have dandruff, maybe their haircut is uneven, and they have a patch of dry skin that you wish they would moisturize. Next to you, the kid has his legs crossed and his shorts are slightly hiked up because of this. You notice the tan line around his thighs, and realize how pasty he really. You see a patch of skin that’s peeling off from sunburn, flakes barely attached, and suddenly you wish you didn’t know what dust really was.

                The past two years have been unlike any other. I finally went on medicine for my acne, I co-started a band that has given me something in my life that I never thought would exist, and I have met some truly amazing people along the way. I started this blog as a way to talk about the things that I want to say but never do. A way to chronicle the progression from acne-plastered loser to what I am today, and what I hope to be in the future.

Because today, I can look above the broken webcam in the screen of my laptop that I used to worry might be on when it shouldn’t, and look into the mirror of the coffee shop and think to myself, “Tom, you don’t have to look away.”