Anticlimactic Week

Just when it seems like something is going to happen, nothing does. It's kind of like celebrating the New Year, since everybody seems to be talking about that lately. There’s a whole countdown, and then it’s the next year, and that’s it. There might be celebrating, but it still seems like not a lot happened at the end of the countdown. You expect there to be a big explosion or for money to fall from the sky. Perhaps a giant cat will walk down the street handing out chocolate to all the children. Nothing happens, though. First you’re here; then you’re there. That’s it.

I was reading a story in one of my classes about a story of a man who is about to be executed. Something goes wrong, though and he makes up a daring escape which takes up most of the story. Just as he is about to get home, though, he figures out everything is in his head. Nothing went wrong, and he didn’t really escape. The whole story took place in his mind in the few seconds before he is killed. He dies, and the story is over. Oh, it was a dream. That’s it. I suppose the ending was fairly surprising because of how it was written, but there was a lot of build up and nothing happened.

I had waited for a few days to go the mysterious meeting I was told to go to by a card in the mail. It didn’t say what it was for, it just said to come for possible prizes. I assumed they, whoever they were, were going to try to get me to sign up for something that would result in me losing money. I wanted to find out exactly how they were going to go about getting their hands in my pockets. I think they would have done a good job. Then my father called and said he was going to visit at the same time as the mysterious meeting would have been, so I missed it. I’m really curious now as to what they were going to do. Perhaps they were aliens and wanted to do experiments on us. I’d like to have superpowers as long as it didn’t mean the aliens had to stick anything strange in me, or rather, stick anything into me in strange places.

One of my teachers said that we were going to have a quiz. Everybody was really worried about it and tried to cram in some last minute studying. The classroom looked like a fluster of squawking chickens with a wolf in the middle. Then we just never had the quiz. The teacher didn’t say anything about it. We simply never had the quiz. Maybe the teacher just wanted us to study, maybe the teacher just forgot, and maybe the teacher didn’t really mean that we were going to have a quiz. Nobody knows, and nobody is going to ask—just in case the teacher remembers and decides to give the quiz after all.

I was running a little late to a first class of the day, or rather I was biking late. It’s a class you can’t be late to get to because we watch movies that we will have to write papers about, and the movies start right away because there is barely enough time to watch them. Melted snow from my tires gave me freckles. My legs were burning. I jumped off my bike, locked it, and scurried to my room like my cat does when it’s time to eat. I was going to get there just on time, and then I found out that we would be starting late anyway because the one of the machines was broken.

I’ve been going through this long story now for a few weeks, and I’m just about to the end of it, but because of the previous pattern, I’m not going to expect much. Maybe I already got to the end, merely thought there would be more, and I just didn’t know it.