Carrying

I carry my future around just like my past: not quite sure if I can remember what it is and certainly unable to work out what it means. Like the boy in the record shop, once. Was his a future I once looked forward to?

The poor kid was about 13 or 14. He had carefully cultivated a look of dark scruffiness, hair low over the face to conceal freckles and spots, shapeless jacket to conceal a total lack of posture. Both tactics failed dismally and only drew attention to these bodily defects, which would otherwise have been unnoticeable and perfectly acceptable. He wasn’t really ugly, just far more ungainly than he needed to be. A couple of the trendy, lithe, black-clad shop assistants were next to him, the second one offering support and strength to the voluble one. He was talking earnestly but rudely to this boy, and on the pretext of checking out the older vinyl releases, I moved myself casually within earshot, and was depressed to hear what was going on.

“But”, the boy pleaded, “I only want to know which one to buy.” He was literally crying, shoulders giving away what his hair hid. “No way”, sneered the assistant. “You are not one of us, you don’t understand what to buy, you ain’t dressed right, no-one likes you. You can bugger off out of here and don’t come back, you make the place look a mess.” The boy was devastated, and a little ridiculous. He clearly didn’t fit, but what was he supposd to do, I wondered? I couldn’t believe that this music shop would put fashion above business. It doesn’t happen. Something was deeply wrong. I left the shop quickly, and the sobbing boy blundered out, too. I had a sudden inspiration. In the crowded street I positioned myself so that I bumped into him and said in a low voice, right in his ear, “you know, if you shop in a nearby town they won’t know who you are.”

My problem now is that the dawn of realization that hit while the notion of anonymity sank in seems to be something I experienced first-hand. So now I don’t know if I was the kid or the detached observer. Perhaps one is my past, and the other is my future.