The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Dear Children , FTL Bonus Entry

Dear Children,

I am a grown-up, at least, I'm sure this is how you see me when I duck in and out the doors to your school. You might refer to me laughingly as 'that old chick', 'ma'am' or even 'cougar', but it isn't likely I'll ever know for sure. When I walk up the stairs to the room where the other adults are, I leave you in my wake, many of you breathing through your mouths, some with crooked teeth, most with spotted skin, and I never look behind me. The silence tells me you're watching, that you are conscious of my presence, and I am not affected by it, which I find interesting.

I am writing this because I think it will be therapeutic for me, having been nauseous with pent up rage over the last week that I've been forced to share air with you. To be frank, most of you irritate me. The girls with their heavy makeup and cracking gum, the boys with their lop-sided baseball caps and putrid funk of stale meat and garlic. I despise the way you sit against your lockers with your feet stretched out, impeding the oncoming traffic, thinking it funny when others have to maneuver around them, like you were within your rights to be there. I loathe the slit-eyed looks at the girls who love their books, or at the boys who live and breathe physics. I hate the way you speak, with your monosyllabic exclamations and breathy grunts, unless you're using foul language in which case there is a new kind of enthusiasm in your communication skills. I hate the garbage you leave on the floor, the crushed tomatoes on the staircase, the cold french fries under the locker doors. I hate that you think the adults still have to clean up after you, even though you're well able for it, perhaps in more suitable shape for it than we are.

I hate the way you look at each other, with a raw kind of sexual curiosity which is more annoying than endearing. The boys are looking at the girls like they're steak, and the girls are returning those looks with their own blend of yearning and mettle. I can see the clumsy sex on all of your faces, the accidental pregnancies, the thirty-second experiences. Boys, your erections are in your eyebrows, as well as in your pants, with half-sprouted pubic beards and pink, oily skin beneath it. Girls, your need for love can be seen in the exposed crack of your pants, in the buttons you choose to leave undone, and in the intensity of red in your lipstick. I walk past you and I smell the sweet onion sweat and gush of precious fluids and I feel sick. You're too young, I think, to know what you're doing. I've seen it all before. I wasn't always an old chick.

I would like to box the ears of every boy who spits on the pavement. It's disgusting, really, and it always will be. I feel angry and intolerant of those of you shivering by the pine trees, desperate for a cigarette, when you're all of sixteen years old. Why don't you know you're stupid? Why can't you find any fear in the reality that you are at the beginning of a habit you might not be able to stop, one which might lead to a long, agonizing death? It will harm you, harm everyone around you, and you are shivering there, in the cover of pine trees, trying to keep the match lit while you bring your death into your lungs. You stand there with an arsenal of information and you reject it. You puff away despite the grandfather you had who dissolved into a pile of ash after screaming with pain for months because of his addiction. I will have no pity for you, my soon to be wheezing, sure to be black-lunged friend, no more than I would a person whose hand has been burnt after being told the fire was hot. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Also, you look awful when you do it. Dirty. Unwashed. I'm not the only one who thinks so.

It bothers me to hear your whisperings of Friday night and the way you all intend to get 'wasted'. I suppose it's adolescence, but you should know it will lead to trouble. Remember that kid last year who everyone thought was drunk at the party but really he'd gone into diabetic shock and died? A random situation, maybe, but you know, he's really, really dead. I don't go on like that. I've never thrown a coat over one of my friends when they were in the middle of dying, thinking that they were simply 'trashed, man'. This is because I'm semi-intelligent and you're clearly not, otherwise you wouldn't go on in the way you do, dithering idiots who need to get sloshed in order to alleviate the pressure of...a chemistry test? A part-time job? The freedom you have to do what you want when you want to? Straighten up, morons. You're blowing your chances.

And who amongst the lot of you is responsible for vandalizing the park next to the school? Come on, genius, let's have an admission. Who's brave enough to cop to their recklessness and inconsideration? Isn't it hilarious to rip a tire swing off its chain so that little children can't use it? Did you not want to pee your pants in glee when the see-saw was pulled from its base and rendered 'broken' so that the little innocents whose lives revolve around the place could no longer use it? Well, aren't you clever! Aren't you so very, very audacious.

Oh, and let's speak to your fashion. Every one of you, regardless of body type (endomorphs, ectomorphs and mesomorphs alike), are somehow convinced you all look the same in sweatpants. A sea of black, grey, olive green and general 'puke' coloured cotton. The hall way crusted with it, like feces and moss growing on either side of it, long-legged scowls in ill-fitting sweats. Oh, I wore my black, but we were a little more genuine, more inspired. Our angst was polished and we wore it with the right attitude, not like your sloppy, lazy, fat-assed excuse for day wear. You can't call a boy with pants down to his knees 'handsome', no more than you can call a girl wearing pajama pants to school 'pretty'. Maybe you don't care, though. Maybe you're there to learn.

laughs

Yes, I'm sure that's it.

What pains me is the look on the faces of the real people among you. Exasperation, worry, disconcertion. I know they aren't the popular ones. I know they're the ones who shrink under your watchful eyes. I wish I could wrap my arms around them and thank them for being true to themselves, for being kind despite the pressure to be idiots. These are the ones who turn out to be more interesting in the end, if not for the pesky insecurities which are being planted in them now, incubating under the heat lamp of puberty. If only I could tell them they'll be okay that one day they won't remember any of your names, no more than you know theirs now.

What you are, is caught between worlds. You are children desperate to adults, and adults who refuse to leave your childhood(s) behind. You want the sex, but you lack the maturity to understand it. You want the power, but you can barely lift it up. You want the voice, but it cracks when you open your mouths. What you do, instead, is run in beheaded chicken circles, kicking up dust, gravel pinging off windows, and you can't figure out why no one wants to trust you, why no one wants to listen.

And yet, this is not entirely an accusation. I know you can't help it, that you are quite possibly in flux when it comes to your grip on sanity. You are frequently at the mercy of lunatic hormones, batty as hell as you become servants to the powers of lust, violence and general pathos, which doesn't usually go away, just a warning. That you are basically morons is not entirely a product of your will, or a sign of the devil's influence. I can see that some of you are beginning to claw your way out of it, while others appear to be sinking into it deeper, and there's nothing anyone can do. You will think everything we, the grown-ups, say is 'lame' or 'sad', but as we were once you, we will have to understand where you're coming from. Maybe you have to experience the day to day life of a jerk before you can legitimately state that you don't want to be one.

To be fair, I hated you even when I was you. I've never been 'down' with blatant rudeness or disrespect of others. Teenaged boys were to be avoided even when I was a teenaged girl, and to be honest, I still feel that was a wise way of conducting my business. Most of them are cocky animals, if you want to know the truth, and you can't blame them. It's the hormones. That I have a small daughter terrifies me because I walk your hallways and I am projecting to the future, seeing my beautiful, golden-haired princess wearing baggy sweats with a black thong peeking over the waistband. I am picturing myself catching her smoking by the pine trees, and me having to drag her by said golden hair to our home where there will a scene of epic proportions. I cringe to imagine pimply boys reaching up under her top, and her allowing it to happen. This makes me feel violent. This brings on my crazy. Knowing that she will be insane in ten years makes my own lunacy stand up and say hello.

So, now that I've purged and made it clear that you offend me, in everything you wear, think, say and do, I will close this with a wish that you come out on the other side of this okay. I hope you will become teachers, and parents, and doctors, and anything which doesn't involve selling drugs in alleyways or your bodies to people in dark cars. I look forward to having conversations with you about things which won't require expletives or 'true dat' at the end of a sentence. I want you to succeed, to stop spraying your name on the sides of buildings, to leave pumpkins alone on the old lady's porch across the street on Halloween night. I want you to emerge from this strange and ridiculous period of life without an STD, a story of rape, a close call in detox or a screaming baby with a loaded diaper. When you come out of it, no longer a child, and every bit a grown-up, maybe then we'll talk.

Until then, get the hell out of my way when I'm walking down the hallway.

Respectfully,

The Old Chick, Cougar Lady.