peacocks and disillusionment

It's funny the things you remember when you're chained to a desk with a screeching fire alarm in your ears (a sustained blast drill, we're told), an unidentified rumbling in the airspace above you, and a restlessness in your chest that comes from being completely unfulfilled, and yet immobile.

so, I'm sitting at a restaurant in texas somewhere, at some time, and it's a long, communal, last-supper type table near a window. I'm sitting with a lot of others from my high school and some other high schools...on our way to a writing competition maybe?...my best friend to my left and a boy across the table for whom I have pined, silently, for a number of months. from the window we have a view of a courtyard where several peacocks strut around gallantly, feathers splayed. it must have been spring.

my friend and I, and this boy, who is now nameless and faceless but for a mushroom of sandy-blond hair, are engaging casually in that witty sort of banter that high school kids believe is the mark of intellect and desirability. at one point, my friend makes a remark about something being hideous. the water glasses? the view? I don't remember now. I just remember the word, hideous, and the response from across the table.

"wow, impressive vocabulary," the boy says (seriously, mind you), and I watch his eyes suddenly glaze over as he looks at her anew.

I stare at him flatly. beside me, my friend blushes and sputters, giddy over the sudden attention.

hideous? really? wasn't that one of my third grade spelling words? i am torn between contempt for his low threshold for admiration and my own need to prove myself. dammit, why couldn't I have said hideous? or a word that would truly have merited appreciation: vituperative, pusillanimous, meritorious?

thoroughly disgusted, my tender teenage illusions shattered, I stare out the window where one of the peacocks is doing his best to mount a homely and disinterested female. a few of the other students notice, and there is some snickering and pointing from our group. but the boy across the table is still gazing starry-eyed at my friend, who is lapping it up. and who could blame her?

I have no idea what happened after that, it's just that one moment in time, fossilized in my mind. why that moment? what was the take-home message that was so important that I am still lugging it around 15 years later?

maybe it's that people don't really change. maybe it's that they do. maybe it's to remind me how far I've come, and yet, how much I'm still the same. who knows.

well, back to my work. I'd like to have a view of a courtyard with mating peacocks, but instead I have a view of a roomful of inmates, who most of the time display the same kinds of behaviors. I guess it's just animal instinct.

hideous, really.