Memoir Monday: Graves, Homework, and People.

Dirt, rust, leaves, twigs, they grasp to my shoe, and they cling there. I extricate my foot from a hole I myself dug, my father and brother are there, yet my mind is not on them. Not on the graves we are hunting for, but the grave I dug for myself. The metal detector in my hand is silent as I sweep it along, a foot above the ground. The knowledge that I was screwed had slowly instilled itself in me, all the work I had not done was going to hit me like a tidal wave, anger and the most pathetic form of self-pity would encompass me. I was the victim of my own guile, of my own “BS” as people love to call it when they talk to me.

Then metal detector goes crazy, and I sweep it back to where it was before, iron, probably just a pipe or something, but that's not up for me to decide. I take a shovel and I slam it down to the ground, but the strength and the enthusiasm that I usually can summon fails me, and it slams in miserably. Bill makes a comment about how my generation has no backbone, but what people think of all the idiots at school is not an imperative issue to me.

My dad looks at me with a look of disappointment and worry, but I know it will not compare to his look on Monday. The idea of just skipping school recurs in my mind constantly, to escape my doom. He takes the shovel, and starts to dig up in the place my brother indicated, prevalent as it is. In an act of spontaneity and rage, I took the other shovel, and started to dig up in a spot we had already dug up. The shovel sliced through the dirt, splitting through it's layers of life, the roots, and breaking them into pieces. I stare at what we had uncovered earlier. Strangely enough, a foot under the layer of soil was concrete, with a rusty piece of metal sticking out, stuck in the concrete.

We were digging here because next to Bills house, the one's whose garden we were wreaking havoc on, they had found dozens of French graves, with only numbers on them, keeping the casualties anonymous. Chances are I live not only next to two graveyards, but on one.
Creepy.

I stare down at the concrete, knowing that this could have been part of some suckers grave, and that the rusty trash metal was likely part of a grave marker which had been ripped up and dumped in the pile next door all those years ago. I wonder what it would be like, just to not have to worry about anything, about all the school, all the drama, all the stuck up idiots, all the sensitive retards. It could be nice, in a way, just to escape all the crap in life. Then I look back at the green of my neighbourhood, random people are going through the streets, and I remember back to my friends who are all around the world.

What a stupid idea.
Now to go back to my disposition of a cynical, sarcastic, arrogant, but damn happy individual, and pick up the damn shovel.