Life is fine. Life is nice. Life is simple.

“I shouldn’t even be here,” I say to myself.
Due to various circumstances with exam schedules, I find myself sitting at a local coffee shop located near my high school. I realize how much I hate coffee as I look around at the coffee regulars that seemingly inhabit the place. The ambience is nice though, it’s relaxing, soothing. I look down at my watch and realize that four long hours are ahead of me before the buses would arrive at school.
Four hours, I can spend that time doing absolutely nothing. That’s the kind of person I am after all. A person with all the time in the world, but doesn’t spend a second of it doing anything worthwhile.
I wish I had a friend. That isn’t to say that I don’t have any, I mean, I have friends. It just so happens so that none of them would spend their afternoon chatting it up with someone like me. Although, if I had a friend like that, I am sure that I’d be next to them right this second with them having a wonderful conversation about whatever is on our minds.
Fine, if I’m going to sit here for four hours, I may as well and make a new friend or two. Not all of the faces in the coffee house are completely foreign to me; I recognize a few faces but no one in particular. It would be so easy to go up to any one of them and strike up a conversation. But just as fast as the thought comes to me, the motivation fades just as quickly. I find myself slouching back into my seat, tired at the simple prospect of getting up and starting a conversation.
I sure am lazy, but it isn’t all sloth that prevents me to get up and start mingling with the people around me. Mix in a little fear and some respect with the fact that everyone else is currently busy with some indiscriminate part of their own life, and you get a pretty good idea of why the concept of me leaving my chair seems like a far-fetched one.

I ask the person sitting next to me for a sheet of paper. He looks to be about my age, I could have talked to him but I had more important things on my mind then. The dark haired teenager looks at me with some skepticism, his hair dyed brown from the hours he must have spent in the pool. He asks me what for, and I tell him it is to kill some time. He gives me a strange look but eventually complies with my request. I take out a spare pencil I have and started doodling. Now, I’m no Van Gogh, but there is something mesmerizing about watching a pencil glide over a stark white sheet of notebook paper regardless of whether the artist is a seasoned artist or an amateur like myself. Minutes begin to pass by as I slowly kill the time that daunted me when I first sat down at this table. Time certainly flies when you aren’t doing anything worthwhile, but hey, at least it’s easy.

After I’m done, I briefly revel in the sketch then I carefully fold it and slip it into my pocket. I pull out a small coin box where I keep my change in. I give it a small shake and see all of the quarters I’ve amassed over the season. Quarters seem like the only coins that retain any value to me.

“I hate change,” I think to myself.

I chuckle at the double entendre as I get up out of my seat and approach the counter.

“Can I have a tall strawberry milkshake please?” I ask trying to muster my most polite sounding tone.
The cashier, appearing no more than a few years older than me attempts to explain that they ran out of strawberries so they can’t make my order. Well great, now the one thing I always get at these places is unattainable, so maybe I’ll try something new.

“Oh, well in that case, can I have ah…” My eyes slowly fumble around the menu attempting to find a suitable replacement to my first failed attempt “A double chocolate frappuccino?”

I cringe at the sound of the metallic coins clinking in my hand. More useless weight I think to myself. The cashier tries to have small talk with me while waiting for my order. He tells me a story about his youth and ends it off with a sarcastic remark that makes me feel like he was less mature than he looked. My drink is ready. I dismiss him with a turn of my head.

“Pft, you think you’re funny?” he scoffs at me as I walked back to my seat.

What the heck is wrong with me? I’m in no rush, I bear no grudge against a random coffee shop cashier but the feeling of remorse quickly subsides as I realize how much effort it would have taken if I spent the time to converse with him. I feel guilty as I walk away as he really did seem like a decent guy. I don’t know what made me turn away from him, but I suppose there is no helping it now.

I recline back into my seat and survey the crowd around me. It’s been an hour and a half and the people haven’t really changed.

I see a young college student typing away at his computer. Probably programming, I think. His fingers fly across the keyboard as the pixels on the screen conformed to his every command. I could make out some polygons from the place I was sitting at but nothing more. Now there’s someone who knows what they want to do and seems damn good at it too. I’m jealous of those kinds of people, the ones who know what they want to do because they have what I don’t; the ability to see into their future. To them, I guess I might as well be blind.

I overhear a local conversation from the table next to mine.

“So, do anything interesting over the weekend?” a student with straight brown hair on his head and yellow headphones around his neck asks his companion.

“Nah,” his companion responds smoothly.

I laugh to myself. No one ever claims that their life is amazing. It seems like such a vain and pretentious thing to do. Coming out and placing your experiences above other people just comes off as shallow. To me, people’s lives should be theirs to claim and for other people to gauge, not the other way around. However, if everyone responded like the kid sitting next to me, I think, then you would never get a taste of anyone else’s experience except your own.

I reflect on my own life and come to the realization that I feel old. Not old in the physical sense but in the mental sense. Every time I see people my age or younger chatting, or pulling shenanigans, I can’t help but slow down and reflect upon how slow my own life is going. This is quite an unfortunate revelation I thought to myself. I am only fifteen years old, so there shouldn’t be any logical reason as to why I should feel any older than the people surrounding me. It must be the exhaustion I feel from my life. It must be the tiredness I get from the daily grind. But if this is what happens to me at age fifteen, I can only imagine how terrible it’ll get when I’m twenty, or thirty even.

I look down and stare at my polished clock face. Almost time, guess I could head back as I take a sip of my iced beverage. Opening the door to the coffee house let a blustery wind of a cold winter’s day hit me and my drink as I walk out the door. I hadn’t made it a few steps before I felt my chest shaking.

What? I’m wearing my jacket, and I have enough layers to warm ten children thanks to my mother. Why am I shaking so much?

I look down at my hand to see the cause of my frozen condition. I can’t help but marvel at my own ignorance as I throw the frappuccino into the nearest trash can. As I walk back to school, a casual passerby may hear a faint *clink* as the pressure in my hand loosen to rid myself of currency that irritates me so. The sound of cars and self-righteous businessmen polluted my ears as I walk. I was like an independent element from society, no connections, and no communication with the outside world.

After I arrive at my high school, I sit down against a wall and try to warm up my hands by breathing on them. I notice the time on my watch, 2:00, which means there’s just a few more minutes before I will have my break from this isolative torture.

At 2:05, the buses start arriving and I am ready to get up and go on my merry way. Five more minutes before they leave which means five more minutes before I have my freedom. I stand up, and begin walking toward my bus when I notices a girl student sitting a few feet from the position I had just gotten up from. Strange, I don’t recall her being there. Did she just show up or has she been there the whole time?

Well, doesn’t matter to me, I’m out of here. I take a step, and then it happens. It sounds like glass shattering, but it isn’t outside, it is in my mind. It’s like a part of me just broke, and everything came to me, everything I wanted, and everything I was doing. The realization hit me and then I stand in a daze. Friend…. The “only five minutes left” attitude begins to morph into a “Well, I have five minutes to spare” attitude. I make my way back to where I sit and lower myself to the position I was in just a few seconds ago. I take a deep breath and exhaled. I turn to the student sitting next to me and I ask,
“How’s life?”