The Procession

Today I had great success doing something I didn't deserve to do. As I was enjoying my publicly earned handshakes and shoulder-pats, a weird-looking faux-hawked kid abruptly interjected my sweet victory with a bland and vacant stare that very clearly violated my euphoria as well as my personal space. Honestly, euphoria is overrated; personal space is not. He dressed like a punk/goth kid who has his parents arrange his outfits for him. Oh honey these chains will look so cute on you next to that little studded wristband. He looked like a skateboard at a yard sale.

Anyway, he just stood there in my personal space looking like a doofus, and he continued to unblinkingly stare into my eyes until I too felt like a doofus. To me he had a strange presence that affected the immediate world around me. I sensed the people I perceived around me gently react to this infiltration, and from my peripheral vision it looked like something akin to that mental shit in Inception, if you've seen that.

Uncomfortable with this current state of affairs and unhappy that I had to set eyes on him at all, I quickly engaged in reliable small talk rhetoric, quietly harboring the snappy hopes of zipping through the geography and common interests portions of the exam and skip straight to the warm and heartfelt farewells. Fast-forward thirty seconds, and you would find my performance was pitch-perfect. Flawless Victory. However, just as I was about to shake my own hand and congratulate myself for yet another ditching job well-done, he quickly turned and floated his head to my ear and slowly whispered these lines:

"You looked very comfortable up there. Just remember you can't escape the process."

Then he turned and walked away.