Spectator Sport

The year I was to begin High School, we moved. All of about a mile, but it may just as well have been a hundred. Everyone I knew in the world, all my friends, were gone. My brother and sister were closer to their school, and their friends were closer to them, but for one reason or another, I didn't go to the same school as them. I went to a private school, that took an hour or more to get to each morning. There was never any issue with my siblings about this, they didn't seem to care in the least, though I wonder now if I shouldn't have put in a little more effort, academically at some point to compensate for the privilege.

So I now lived in an isolated world, very much. None of my old primary school friends were around, they had all gone to new schools. None of the other students from my school lived anywhere near me, and even if they had, I was always getting the impression that geographic location was not the only thing separating me from them. The parties I occasionally got invited to, and the houses they lived in, and the clothes they wore on free dress day - they were residents of a completely foreign country to me.

It was a long time before I made friends, really. I would go to school and talk with people and socialise, and get the buses and trains there and back. I was interacting with people all day every day. But they weren't really friends. Not really. No one I felt I could confide in. No one to be stupid with in a relaxed way. Sure there was a lot of showing off, and bravado, and all manner of ridiculous adolescent behaviour. But I was never really at ease with anyone. It was the beginning of what I think of as my life as a spectator.

I felt often, as though I was just observing the world move around me. I understood it, and I observed it, and in some ways I interacted with it. But I never really felt a part of it. I remember even now thinking that sometimes when I would get a sensation of ringing in my ears that it was some kind of signal I couldn't comprehend, that it marked me in some way to be separated from the events and lives around me. I'm sure a shrink would have a field day with that kind of delusion.

But it is a result, I think, of spending so much time alone. I had sisters, and a brother, and yet, I recall more time spent on my own than interacting with anyone, much. I would read, I would play solitary games, I would build things, or pull them apart to see how they worked, then reassemble them so as to avoid the resulting punishment for being destructive. But often, more often than not, I was alone. Alone on the walk to school, alone on the bus to the station, alone on the train, alone on the bus to school, at least until a few stops in, when it would begin to fill up. Not that anyone I really knew got on the bus that early on. And then a reverse process on the way home. Often arriving home to an empty house, because the parents were at work, the siblings were all at friends' houses, and I was home, alone.

I don't think I was lonely, I was, and still am, quite happy with my own company. I could always occupy my time on my own. In fact, i don't think I even missed the companionship of having friends around all the time. My social interactions at school were in retrospect, a kind of calculated performance for effect. I suppose everyone does this to some extent, but the outcome was never quite in focus, the goal not clearly defined. Was I trying to be popular? Not really. The popular kids bored me, for the most part. I was never attracted to whatever it was they liked. Sport, Top 40 radio songs, clothes I couldn't afford...

I know I loved it when I got the attention of the girls, though. I was always nice to them, always polite to them, always listening, always understanding, always trying to get the inside edge with the ones I liked, and ultimately learned the hard way that this resigned a player to being only a spectator. It results, more often than not, in that single statement that turns a boy's blood cold in his veins when it comes from the object of his desire. A simple phrase, innocuous on the surface, but effectively excluding all other relationship possibilities for the future, handed down as a judgmental sentence so many times:

"I like you as a friend"