By Julian
There was a time that I lost all interest ever built up in my life. I’d catch myself staring off into the distance of my classrooms window, debating whether the scary thoughts in my head had ever been cursed upon another child’s mind. This was a question that continuously stabbed at my sanity and questioned my will to fight through it.
I snapped out of my trip into the dark depths of my mind when the teacher asked me a question knowing I obviously wouldn’t have an answer. After looking at me for a few moments and making a mental note for future reference, she continued her first day lecture on things I wouldn’t later remember. I looked around and saw a classroom of familiar faces. Faces of people I wasn’t too fond of at all. Then after a second scan I noticed a face two seats away that I had never seen before. It was a tall kid that actually seemed pretty cool. A few more glances over and I realized no one knew him. He didn’t have any friends and seemed pretty awkward to say the least.
I sympathized and decided the right thing to do was to try and talk to this kid. Maybe I could figure out why he was such an outcast and try to help him fit in with the right group of people.
He was definitely shy when I first started talking to him, and I could sense he was trying to impress me by the way he was talking and how he agreed with everything I said. At first I found his puppy like personality amusing but it quickly began to irritate me and I began to regret ever talking to him.
I’m not sure why he waited until about ten minutes into our conversation to barely mention that he was actually a new student and had never attended an Oakland school before. That pretty much explained everything for me and I kept a more open mind when talking to him.
A few more words and I knew we would become friends. We had a lot in common and actually began questioning each other’s honesty for a while because we had essentially the same past.
We hung out a few times after school, then a few times on the weekend, and we found out that all our goals lay within the same passions. Things I had thought about but never attempted to pursue became so much easier to realistically try. We both introduced and enriched each other’s lives when we mixed them completely.
I felt like I was floating by myself above everyone else in a pointless effort to communicate but then joined by another version of me. This savior in the form of a friend introduced me to a religious lifestyle and began to accompany me on my journey to our similar goals.
Like he said, we were just beach balls fluctuating according to the waves, but then we found each other and started creating our own paths.
I’m still alive and have a bromance that causes jealousy because I one day decided to look past things with an open mind. I looked over and said hi to a weird looking kid named Zildjian (aka Poindexter) and that’s made all the difference.