Young Writers Society

I totally f-d up with the conjugaison of times and I didn't have it checked, both grammer, pronountiation-wise, etc. So, I'm incredibly sorry about it.

*****

Hell on Earth

Sitting here on this bank, I observe people. People say that you can see many different types of guys out here but to me, they all look the same. Same worn out faces, same clothes.

Same routines.

Sometimes, I would play hooky and sit on this bank, in the middle of the main street where swarms of people walk in front of me, reminding me a school of fishes. People say they can be distractive, that sometimes, your eyes would hook on one person and you would follow them until they disappear into the sea of faces, while many others walk past you without a glance, interesting people you would miss during your trail.

***

I wake up at 6 AM as usual. Go to the bathroom and use the same toilet, use the same toothpaste and the toothbrush, the same hairbrush, the same sink and the soap, wear the same uniform, have the same breakfast and wait for the school bus at the same spot at exactly 6:30 every morning. It was a routine I was so used to that if there were very an extremely small change in it, I would feel disturbed and not comfortable in my skin.

It wasn’t normal. I would sometimes wonder if the others felt that way, then I would get distracted by something and forget about that thought, simply scratching a non-existent itch on my wrist caused by the fault in the routine.

I would have the same classes with the same people, with the same teachers. They would all move in a mechanical manner, once the first subject is over, they would do exercises, ask questions, make pop-quizzes then the exam would come and go and you would find yourself already noting down the next subject onto your notebook.

The first half of the day would end like that. Next, I would go to the cafeteria, buy my lunch (each day has a food and the next week will have the same foods, yet they still taste the same) and sit at my usual seat by myself. Loneliness never bothered me. But it seemed to bother people around me. That was a puzzle I wished I could solve but I knew I could never so I never really bothered. Some boy from my class would come, attempt small talk and I would answer with clipped, short responses, not every glancing up.

They would give up after a while. I wouldn’t even bother enough to answer their quiet ‘see you at class’es. I never bothered with people, tired of seeing the same faces every single day.
The bell would ring and I would take my time, slowly walking to the doors of the lunchroom. I never bothered with things like putting my tray away. This school didn’t hire them janitors for nothing.

I would go to my class with my hands in my pocket, as usual, then sit down, surrounded by so familiar, now bland faces. Another seen face would come in at last after an all familiar bell would ring and same monotone routine would begin until 3:15 PM.

I was used to it, so much that if I didn’t see a familiar face, or didn’t hear a familiar voice, my spine would tense, I would tremble and find myself uncomfortable in my skin and disturbed in my mind.

***

Come home, undress and hit the gym. Run, lift, stretch. Come home to find my parents at their usual posts, Mother at the kitchen and Father at his study. We were a close-knitted family, we loved each other.

It was a routine for them to come and great me, ask my day. I would always answer shortly, never liked this stupid routine. It was tiring, and boring yet it had become necessary for me to hear, as it made me feel relaxed and safe, comfortable.

We would eat dinner at 7 PM, I would clean the table while Mother washed the dishes and Father in front of TV with a book on his lap. It was a familiar sight. After fifteen minutes precisely, I would flop myself down next to my father, looking at TV with blank eyes identical to the man next to me, looking at people on the machine but not really listening to or watching.

I always thought of TV shows as pointless and brain numbing.

I would voice this thought and my mother would defense the shows lightly, saying that while they tell us tales that are imaginative, impossible to happen in real life, they give us hope, give us dreams. And I would ask, what use of dreams and hopes when you know they will be unfilled, doomed forever to dust and get musky in a shelf? My mother then would accuse me of being cynical. I would shrug and say nothing. My father would know better than to interfere with our small, pointless arguments.

That evening, I realized my father had started a new book.

“What is it, Dad?”

“Hmm?” he would always ask in distraction, lost in thoughts as always.

“I said, what are you reading?” You would have to repeat a question twice before my father understood it. I couldn’t remember the last time I got annoyed at it, and if I was getting annoyed right now, then it had become a feeling very usual, so usual that I didn’t even realize it.

“Oh.” He would pause for two seconds before answering. Always. “Dante’s Divine Comedy.”
I was surprised, a different emotion for that day, aside from indifference. My father wasn’t a religious man.

“Why that book?”

“Just because I’m not religious doesn’t mean I can’t read books about it. And I enjoy a good piece of literature now and then.”

“Huh.”

Like my father, I was uninterested in religion. He still read about that subject though, he would say that when people ask him why he didn’t believe, he would like to answer. My father was the only man I had seen that read the Bible, Quran and Tanakh and could remember even the shortest article of it.

“You know what? Read this passage.” He gave me the book. I looked at it and read the paragraph out loud, as it was lined with pink highlighter.

“He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the rediscovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape, it is circular and by nature, it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.”

I looked up at my father, meeting his serene, knowing eyes. We didn’t speak, just looking at each other, the low volume of TV and my mother’s singing just a white noise, the light of the kitchen and TV casting weird flashes and shadows onto the peach-colored walls.

I finally broke the eye contact.

“Isn’t it true? So painfully true?” my father smiled.

“I wish we didn’t have to live through it,” I whispered, leaning my head against the arm of the couch and suddenly feeling tired.

“Suicide is always an option. People kill themselves because they can’t bear to live through same things every day.”

To an outsider, it would seem like my father was encouraging me to commit suicide but I knew better. He was simply stating the fact, the truth.

“You wear the same uniform every day, don’t you? See the same faces at school, at home, at the streets? Hear the same voices, listen to the same lessons coming out of the same teachers? Come back home from the same road, drive through the route? And it’s the same the next day? Lather, rinse and repeat every day?” my father chuckled. “When you say it like that, doesn’t it sound like Hell?” he then shrugged, "I got used to it. You will too."

I giggled and nodded, smiling lightly. He patted my shoulder then ruffled my hair.

Dante was right. Life is Hell on Earth.