Empty

It happened on the first day of school.

He had spent the entire summer looking forward to this morning. He had played it out in his head a hundred times. Every detail. He would wear his favorite shirt, checkered red with a black collar, and arrive thirty minutes early to take the first chair, closest to the teacher. He would make a mark on his teachers, establish himself as the one they turned to when the rest of his class offered silence. He would know the answers, all the answers.

As the day got closer, he had gotten more and more anxious. He had scoured through his second hand text books twice now and yet was convinced he didn’t belong. This was a good kind of eagerness, the great kind. His desire, his hunger to learn was unquenchable. He would devour the experience of school in its entirety. This would be the gateway out of his mediocre life. He has never been as certain about anything else.

“Get back to the last row.”

He hadn’t realized he was being addressed. Somebody shook him, violently, sending a little jolt up his spine as his books scattered on the empty floor in front of him.

“This seat is for the brahmins, get back to the last row.”

It had taken a few full seconds for him to understand what was happening. Looking back, those seconds would fill an entire lifetime. He picked up his things, only half believing what had just happened and walked to the desolate chair in the empty corner. It happened as he sat there. Something snapped in his lungs, as if the doors to a secret vault had just drawn open, and he noticed the emptiness. The absolute emptiness that would take the place of everything in his life, his thoughts, his emotions, his desires, his dreams. An emptiness that he would spend an entire lifetime trying to fill, with people, with a career, with objects and yet would remain as empty as that first moment. An emptiness that would become him.