We all change, but I hope we’re all in it together.
I’m driving to my high school for our ten-year reunion. We are the Class of 2010, and I haven’t seen most of my ex-classmates for almost the full ten years. I didn’t like my class very much—there were some cool people, and that was it. It was supposed to be a great high school offering amazing possibilities to stretch your mind and make you gape in amazement. It did that occasionally. Most of the time it gave us so much work that we couldn’t lift our head up and look around without feeling like we are wasting precious seconds that could instead be used to do intriguing chemistry homework or commit crucial history dates to memory. We, or at least I, studied from Sunday morning till Thursday night, couldn’t wait for classes to end on Friday at 3 pm, so we could get drunk. And that lasted until Saturday night slowly grows lighter and turns out to be Sunday morning while we were still drinking, singing, dancing. Then we went to bed unwillingly and woke up three hours later to go home and start memorizing shit again.
I had dinner alone as soon as I got home, but I also sat with my family as they were having dinner. I counted the minutes I spent with them. As soon as they went over thirty, the guilt in my stomach made me mumble something about how much work I had, and I walked up the stairs to my room with a sinking heart. Cleaning the kitchen took at least forty-five minutes, and I hated it because I could have written one more page for my paper had I not cleaned the kitchen. The guilt, or stress, or whatever, gnawed at my stomach, and nothing was good enough.
Fuck that, I think while turning left at a small traffic light. Ahead of me I have a ten minute drive on the road surrounding the city, so I can enjoy the trees on both sides of it and the holes in the road, although I need to admit they are in a better condition than usual. It’s 6 pm, and the roadside ladies are swaying their hips, looking at drivers, hoping to make some of them happy after they have sat on their asses in the office all day long. I always look at the roadside ladies. I drive up and down this road ever since we moved in our house, but I still stare at the ladies’ colorful but austere clothes as I’m driving to go out or come back home. I wonder what it’s like to get fucked so many times per day, to give so many blowjobs, and to see so many dicks. I know condoms are obligatory, but giving a blowjob to a dick wearing a hat is disgusting. Don’t their mouths go dry? Don’t their pussies hurt? Do they shave completely? Do guys fuck them like pieces of meat on the backseats of their cars? Do angry, bored men treat them badly, or do they not care at all? I wonder what they are thinking while they are looking for the next client. I know some hookers are elite, but these are not. Still, they look like they know what they are doing.
In a little while, the trees on both sides of the road grow fewer, and a construction site greets me on each side of the road. I press a button under the radio in my car to stop the air conditioner from taking any air from outside: the air my car is splitting in two is so dusty. I stop at a traffic light, and I pull up slowly because there’s a heavy-looking truck in front of me as dusty as the air. It’s marked with a foreign register number (?), but my eyes aren’t strong enough to let me read the small print of which country it is. Green light switches to yellow while I’m driving slowly, but it’s not my fault I didn’t stop: if I had tried to be a perfectly conscientious citizen, I should have stopped in the middle of the crossroad, which is also illegal. The car behind me, though, decided to play cool and cross too, although he could have stopped perfectly well. To his bad fortune, there is a policeman waiting for guys like that right after the crossroad. He waves to the car behind me to pull over. Poor driver, they are also trying to fight corruption, so I would not try to give him ten bucks to fight it off. He would have to listen to a criticizing lecture pour out of the policeman’s mouth and then pay his fine. Too bad, I hope you’re not in a hurry, poor guy.
In ten minutes, I park my car in front of my old school gate. I leave the car under a tree that’s blooming, and I know from experience that it drops some thick, sweet liquid that forms sticky drops on the windows. It’s like permanent rain on my windows, so I don’t move the car.
It’s 4.47 pm, and Anna said she’d be here by 4.45. She pointed out that she was punctual now. That’s impressive, I thought, remembering the times when the other girls and I told her we were meeting at 6 when the meeting was actually at 6.30. I sit on the front hood of my car and waited for Anna—she hasn’t changed that much, it seems.
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