For years on end I have started pieces of writing without finishing them - my latest attempt at what I deem 'the great Scottish novel' being undoubtedly my best, but still unsatisfactory. I have a certain character in mind, inspired by boys I know, and boys I wish I knew. It's just something I'm batting around.
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Have you ever worried that you have absolutely nothing in common with the rest of your age group? Have you ever been afraid that you're different from them all? Have you ever felt ashamed of the fact that you will never, ever be like your friends? I haven't - I've been proud of it since I was old enough to understand it.
And I think I understood it pretty quickly, pretty early on in my school career. I hate that phrase, "school career": your career is something that earns you money and ideally (though probably unrealistically) something you enjoy doing. It’s not a string of letters and numbers on a piece of paper. They're rather important letters, though. You get people in tears over them, parents shouting, teachers shaking their heads... It's so utterly overhyped. There are university students with no qualifications whatsoever, who got themselves a place because they had "life experience": seeing and doing rather than just sitting at a desk. Surely we all should be given opportunities like that, rather than forced to memorise the distance formula.
I know the distance formula, by the way. I can do advanced algebra and I know pi to a good few decimal places. I'm good with dates and names. I'm fantastic at English. But that's unrelated. That's not what I want to say.
Let me set the scene for you. I need us to be on the right track before I can begin to tell you anything. My name is Nathan Kane and I'm eighteen. I look older than that, though, because I'm tall and thin and generally sharp at the corners, and I dress better than anyone I know. I don't mean that to sound conceited, of course - it's just that everyone here tends to wear the same things in different colours. Four of my classmates have the same jacket. Four. It's from the big sports shop on the main street, it’s ludicrously expensive, and it has 'NIKE' sewn onto it so small you can hardly read it. You can though, obviously, as that's the whole intention. I don't like it to be that apparent when I buy into a brand.
Where I live isn't important as all it will do is force an inaccurate accent upon me and my narrative. My accent is from all over yet I've lived here all my life. I guess that comes from being raised by British parents and American television in a society that, whilst intolerant of most races, is brimming with diversity. I don't talk the way they do here because I enjoy coming across as a sentient human being.
I don’t tend to like people; I can merely tolerate those I have even the utmost disdain for longer than anyone should be able to. I can’t abide sport as a conversational topic, for one thing. Something about watching a tangle of grown men chase a ball just doesn’t appeal to me.
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It’s cold here, I’ll tell you that. The rain is unrelenting, a cacophonous symphony of marbles on stone harmonising with the rustling of plastic bags. I stare unwaveringly up at it from my double bed - the mattress is soft as hell and I don’t care what it’s doing to my posture. Every bedroom should have a skylight, I decide, as I watch globules of water hit the slightly scummy glass of mine, merging into each other and sliding quickly along the sloped surface. It’s the most relaxing thing I can ever imagine myself doing.
I like the rain, you know? I like the way it smells - that fresh, wet scent that tells you something’s changing, because things change in the rain. Think about it - you’re never quite the same after a downpour, even if all that means is you’re now soaked to the skin. The wind starts blowing fiercely, howling its way across the town, as I mull this thought over in my head, making me feel a rush of gratitude for my current state of extreme physical comfort and warmth. I close my eyes and let the climatic orchestra play me to sleep.
I understand what you mean about the mean-sounding narrative, so I'll bear that in mind. As for X, I chose it mainly because I couldn't think of a title, but it's growing on me. It's making your mark - that's what people used to do before literacy became all the rage and they knew how to spell their own names. X isn't really anything, despite representing many, so this lets it be something.