When I walked out of that high school, I got a weird feeling—it was a feeling that would persist.

This was a time and place I had left. I could never go back.

It was a reoccurring nightmare, that I kept repeating my senior year of high school.

I got older, but I never left the classroom. Those desks and chairs were bolted to the floor.

It might be how a 90-year-old man feels in the nursing home, when his chess buddies keep getting recycled into the earth as compost.

Perhaps, he urinates on the flowerbeds when the orderlies aren’t looking, so he can feel that he still has freedom.

I gave-up on my golf dreams. I was 23, and instead, I set my mind on becoming a writer—my other life-long ambition.

I went to the local library, and checked-out books. I didn’t have a job. It was the summertime.

I experienced long days without work. I rode my bicycle into the sunset.

I walked into the woods behind the golf course.

There were the same guys I had worked with, raking sand traps and cutting grass. It was surreal, like walking back into high school again.

When I quit, my boss asked me if I had another job lined up.

“No,” I said.

“Well, you could work for me this summer and make some bucks.”

“No—not for any amount of money.”

This offended him, but he had already pissed on me several times. It felt good to say “no”.

I told the girl in my accounting class what I’d done.

“Good for you,” she said.

Ashley was always smoking pot and calling me up at midnight.

She was worried about getting pregnant by her boyfriend.