Jonas Blackburn

So it appears that re-using old, previously hidden writing pieces is easier than generating something new. This is an excerpt of something I wrote during high school (hugely inspired by Catcher in the Rye). It's obviously rough, but I think it contains some decent imagery and ideas.

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He stopped walking and looked around him, not merely glancing, but actually looking. He was standing in the middle of a long gray hallway, a hallway he walked down many times everyday whose walls were decorated with pictures of people long since dead; pictures of various classes and distinguished individuals who had graduated from the school since 1767. The school boasted about the faces that stared out from those deteriorating pictures and how among them there were Senators, Congressmen, millionaires, two Presidents, and every other blueblood dream. He thought the pictures and the walls fitting for the school because they represented the dead and lifeless spirit of the place. Gray walls and pictures from the past were all that the school was made of; every hall the same, every room the same, and every student the same. They all shared the same gray dreams.

They all came from the same background and shared the same futures. They came from wealthy white families and would take over their father’s business or marry some blueblood’s daughter and take over her father’s business. The school boasted of its diversity in their brochures but the only differences were what luxury cars the students owned. Mayflower Academy, named after the ship that brought most of their families to America, had been a breeding ground for bluebloods since her inception, and nothing would ever change it.

Students filed through the hallway to their afternoon classes in expensive blazers and pants or equally expensive skirts and blouses. He just stood and stared at them. Every single student looked the same. They all sounded the same, talking about the trivial aspects of life. He could hear parts of people’s shallow conversations. No one here cared about anything important, only about making a lot of money in ten years, much like the outside world. A life lived for the future, seemed so shallow and gray he thought to himself. A few students bumped into him as they walked by, some on their cell phones and others too preoccupied with making it to the next class on time so that they could learn groundbreaking economics theory that would allow them to start the next giant industrial conglomerate. Only one student who bumped into him even acknowledged the fact, with a barely audible apology. Everybody ignored him and the rest of the world as they were only preoccupied with themselves. He really felt no differently, so just as shallow and gray, he walked out the front doors of Mayflower Academy.

The cool autumn breeze was blowing outside. The maples and oaks were losing their leaves of red, orange, and yellow and littered the well-manicured bright green lawns of the campus. He stopped walking after a few steps and watched the leaves dance in the wind. A gust of wind would sweep a pile of leaves up and throw them into the sky, like children do when they are playing in their yards; and then slowly the leaves would float back down to the ground, only to be thrown back into the air by another gust of wind. A cluster of leaves tumbled across the lawn and down the hill toward the pond at the edge of campus. They looked like a flock of birds racing through the sky, except that these leaves had no particular place to go. They’d skip through the air, tumble to the ground, and get back up again. The smell of autumn filled his nose and the breeze blew through his coarse blond hair and left his blazer flapping in the wind.

This is life he thought to himself, not what goes on inside those gray walls. The trees, leaves, and water; life. Not the same people, walking down the same halls, and doing the same thing every day. Not just living life as an empty shell with a predestined occupation and fate. He ripped off his black tie and threw it into the wind which carried it a few feet across the lawn where it fell crumpled in a pile of silken pity. He let his books slide from under his arm and fall to the ground. He walked the direction the wind was blowing him, slowly coming upon the edge of the pond. He stared at his reflection.

He was almost a man, or at least the reflection was almost a man. His rugged jaw was diluted in the gentle ripples the wind made in the pond. The reflection’s blue eyes stared at him, taunting him. He saw something in his reflection, in those blue eyes, a glimmer that said his time here was over and that there was something greater in life for him to be doing than being the prototypical All-American boy. His father had made sure that he would be great at everything he did, not for his own personal satisfaction but because his father knew that how he grew up would reflect upon the family name, and that is all his father was concerned with. That is why he spent so much money sending his son to football, basketball, and baseball camps. He was one of the only kids he knew who had his own personal trainer – and thanks to that fact he was the standout athlete at Mayflower Academy. He led his football team to the state championship his junior year, and won two state championships for the baseball team.

Local newspapers were forecasting that this was finally his year for a basketball championship and he would have his trifecta of athletic championships. He was blessed with exceptional genes, he knew this, and so did many big Division I colleges. He had been recruited by many schools to play for them, but his dad would not hear of it – he was going to Harvard, just like his dad had, and that was that. He looked away from his reflection down the road toward town, and Jonas Blackburn made up his mind that he would finally leave and do something more with his life, or at least do something that he wanted to do.