I have to stop posting every day. Anyway, last night I finished a story. It is about a very depressed young man and it is funny as hell. It's about three pages long, but I think it's worth it if you have a few minutes to kill.

The “Feeling Man” of Glen Ridge High

            Nate was a voyeur. It was that simple. Every day, at lunch, he would slink through the halls of Glen Ridge High, looking for couples who were making out. He was skinny enough that, if he wore all black – which he did every day – he might be mistaken for a pole or a column that had mysteriously and suddenly appeared against the wall. No one thought anything of him. Which was all the better for him, because Nate was a voyeur.

            It wasn’t simply the fact that Jason and Rachel were a good-looking, popular couple who had no shame that Nate liked to watch them the most. They made excellent pillow talk. Jason called Rachel his “chickadee,” and Rachel liked to call Jason a “sweetie pie,” and it made all of their friends want to throw up, but Nate loved it. He loved the idea that people could be in love, and have these wonderful feelings for each other, a devotion and a bond between two people that nothing could sever, even in high school. It was beautiful. He dreamed of having that feeling for himself, but there was something about his similarities to a pole or column that made it difficult to attract girls. All he had was his extensive CD collection and, of course, the couples who made out at lunch.

            After a while, though, it was clear that his obsession was beginning to get out of hand. He found himself gravitating closer and closer to Jason and Rachel, imagining himself in a lovey-dovey couple like them, until one day he was sitting next to them, trying to bring his arm around Rachel and simply cuddle with them. He rested his head on his shoulder, letting his floppy, dyed-black hair fall all over her, and cooed as the dandruff landed all over her blouse. Rachel pushed him off and jumped up with a shriek.

            “Who are you?” she yelled, hands flying to clutch her massive breasts out of the fear this stranger might get too excited. “Who are you?”

            Nate slowly took his arm off of Jason and got up, brushing off the dust from his tight black pants. He stared at Rachel, trying to push his face into a friendly grin or a smirk or anything that might be able to save him from embarrassment, something which he had no ability to handle. Last month in English he had made a stupid comment about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and everyone had laughed at him. That afternoon, he cowered under the covers in his room, a dark little hole in the basement, and cried. He cried for hours, and hours turned into days, and days turned into weeks. In fact, he’d only been back to Glen Ridge High to stalk the halls a few days.

            There was the sound of knuckles cracking as Jason flexed his fingers, preparing to beat the living daylights out of Nate for his transgression. Rachel stood to the side, still glaring at him, making little grunts and sighs that made sure everyone knew how pissed off she was. Nate looked around, his tiny knees shaking, his black-rimmed glasses fogging up, and ran through a lifetime of sad song lyrics in his mind for any answers he could think of. But the only things that came out were mental pictures of lonely guys driving too fast on rainy nights, bawling their eyes out and beating the dashboards with frustration over a lost love or a stupid mistake. In the end, they always drove off the road, into woods or off cliffs or into lakes. There was nothing immediately around him that could bring a quick and painless end to Nate’s relentless misery.

            Jason began to stand up, spitting out a slew of cuss words that whipped Nate’s ears and ran through his body and caused his heart to contract. With one burst of depression-fueled adrenaline, he took off as fast as he could, screaming and crying at the top of lungs. He suddenly discovered that his skinny little legs, practically choked by the smallest pair of pants he could find in his sister’s closet, could actually move. The song lyrics flew through him, fighting down Jason’s hateful swears, the tools that were working to destroy everything Nate had been trained to believe about love and devotion, the love and devotion he’d showed to him and Rachel all those weeks. He wasn’t a voyeur. He loved Jason and Rachel. He loved everything they represented. He loved Rachel and her soft hair, her beautiful green eyes and the way her hips moved into Jason’s. He loved Jason and the way he made her feel safe in his arms, the excitement with which he ran his hands over her and kissed her neck, making hickeys to make all the sluts in her fifth period class jealous.

            And now Nate was running from them. In his mind, he was going 100 miles an hour on a narrow, winding road by the ocean, crying as the rain fell, beating the dashboard because he had failed, he had failed, he had failed! He sprinted down the hall, seeing the huge windows at the end, left open as all of the windows in the school were to make up for the fact that Glen Ridge had no air conditioning. Kids flew past and teachers flew past, the memory of Jason and Rachel, as painful as it was to burn off, was slowly disappearing. The windows ahead, with the beautiful blue sky they framed, were getting bigger each second. Nate took a breath as he got closer, holding back the tears for a split-second as he prepared to jump.

            For a second, Nate wondered if his life would have been so pathetic and desperate if he’d ever paid attention to the good things, like how fast he was. For a second, he wondered if he could have been like Jason, and had a girlfriend, and been happy. As his legs flew in front of him and he felt weightless for a second, he wondered if maybe the pain he felt might simply be temporary, and that in a few days he would be fine. And when Nate hit the concrete, he knew the pain he endured would be gone soon enough.