Money Selling Poison

.



"I was feeling bitter and washed up so I decided to go back to school. Many people I knew were going back to school around that time. One foot pressing down hard on the brakes while, at the exact same time, the other foot presses down hard on the gas. To employ a driving metaphor, that is what my life is like. But I don’t drive. In going back to school I was hoping to at least lighten my foot on the brake. I was older than the other students, but apparently came across younger than my age, so the generational divide often went unnoticed or at least unremarked. Nonetheless I felt it. Some days it was the only thing I felt while other days I set it aside. Each day I got up and went to class. I had decided to take all of the classes in the hope at least a few might interest me.

I was also trying to make friends. Trying to figure out how to access my charm. I knew, in certain situations in the past, I’d been charming, but could I do it here at school and on purpose? It was, in many ways, a time of starting over. The school itself was a rather unusual place. It prided itself on how few students were admitted, falsely aligning scarcity with value. Yet this falsehood had also worked on me, since the reason I applied for the scholarship was in the hope of spending time amongst people who were more brilliant than those I’d previously known. In the hopes that being accepted might mean I was also one of the brilliant ones. Since there was always some part of me that believed I already was (alongside some part of me that painfully doubted this fact.)

The acceptance email was formulaic yet meant I could afford to attend. Questions concerning money were the main reason many were deciding to go back to school, their decision contingent on funding. A dreamed of few years of respite from the harsh realities of low wages, of underpayment that subsidized a few more yachts and mansions for the ever-growing ruling class. Every year there were more mansions which meant more tent cities. I didn’t honestly think I’d end up in a tent, but I also wasn’t anticipating any great, undeniable success lying in wait for me along my future path. Like many people at the time, I found it difficult to imagine a future path. School would be a way to postpone the question, the inevitable, not indefinitely but for two full years. A band-aid solution I was hoping might unlock a more substantial one.

You might be surprised to hear that my charm did not immediately rise to the challenge. But everything in this life is a work-in-progress."

- From another attempt at an opening of a new novel, this one tentatively entitled Money Selling Poison



.