Wrapped In A Cocoon

I can hear the engine. I can hear the tires rolling on the uneven pavement. I can practically hear the scenery shifting outside the window as we drive.

It's an odd sensation, that little bit of memory coming back so real and so present in my mind, in my dreams. I pull my legs closer to myself, wondering whether the jeans I'm wearing are a part of the dream as well or whether I'd changed into them when I got home from the bar.

Is this what a mental break feels like?

I mean it would make sense, right? I'd had one hell of a day and I had found through that insecurity a dream that I could cling to. A second chance out there in the world, and what better time than then to begin again.

Going back to college had a special kind of appeal to anyone who was more than a decade past graduation. We look at college and all we remember is the freedom. We remember waking up late and not having anywhere to be. We remember weekdays where the only thing we had to do was show up to an afternoon class and then everything else was optional and yeah we were supposed to do work all day long, studying and learning even out of the lecture hall, but none of us really did.

Most people partied, dancing and drinking and falling into bed with relative strangers. We explored our personalities and we explored our sexualities and we explored what it was to be an adult, completely ignorant to the truth of the matter.

Which was that a year after graduation we'd be locked into a schedule more rigid than any we'd ever had before. We'd have to get up, probably before the light was even thinking of crossing the horizon, and head out the door to a job that we couldn't bring ourselves to care about only to go home and not be able to go anywhere because we were too broke to afford it. Or, if we were successful, we could afford it but were too busy and too tired at the end of the day to do anything about it.

Adulthood seems to be about fifty percent checking your bank account and fifty percent staring longingly at your bed. Faced with that who wouldn't want to return back to the cocoon of college?

But that is an impossibility and frankly it's more than likely nostalgia. A glancing thought back to college brings up only the good times, not remembering that they were well outweighed by the bad.

I had my youth. I had my youthful energy. I had my excitement and my hope for a brighter dawn but my days weren't spent partying and drinking and carousing. My days were spent alone, or with one of my few close friends who I wasn't even in contact with anymore.

No sense lying here. Friend, not friends. Singular.

But that was the point, I suppose. Go back and grab my second chance. Start all over at the beginning when I wussed out and took the easy road thinking all along that it was the right road. Get a second chance and try again, but this time make it different.

Too bad it wasn't going to happen. Too bad this was nothing but the slow decline of my mental faculties and maybe the sound of the engine and the tires were an ambulance carrying me off to a tight white jacket and a room with padded walls. Maybe this was it, my final break.

Maybe, but then again maybe not.

The sound is there one minute and then gone another and I feel the jolt of a sudden stop. I think that maybe we've reached our final destination or that maybe I'm dead and for an instant that doesn't seem so bad even though I know that my current rock bottom doesn't really necessitate all that doom and gloom.

Then there is a shake on my shoulder and it's real. I curl up deeper into my oversized sweater and feel the legs of my jeans shift against my skin and I fight against their attempt to wake me.

If they want to take me, they're going to have to put in more effort than that.

"Come on now," a gruff voice grumbles above me, "Off the fucking bus. I haven't got all goddamn day here."

Wait a second. The bus?

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