I sit silently in my bedroom, the television quietly chatting to itself in the background; the ticking of a long-lost clock is the only other sound in this world of mine. After another dull, slightly irritable day at school (which itself is one bar short of a penitentiary) it feels good to be home and away from the world. Composing myself, I can now think back to a time slightly less pessimistic… a time not quite as distrustful; a time of happiness, albeit naïve happiness.
The time in question was just into the twenty-first century, and after the ordeal of a possible digital apocalypse was behind him, man was looking towards his future with wide eyes and a cautious smile on his face. I myself was almost completely unaware of how close the world as I then knew it had come to changing completely. For me, the proverbial light that illuminated the path into the future shone just as bright as I could remember and showed no sign of changing. This light, however, was still not as bright as it used to be.
As a child roughly the age of eight, I was a fan of laughing and playing as much as the next, but still liked to keep to myself, as the whispers referring to me as “that quiet boy” from teachers and parents of friends could confirm.
The place I remember is really nothing special in retrospect, just a room above the office of a friend’s mother, an estate agent, but I remember it as an escape from the world below: the inner sanctum of Tommy’s. It was a room with contents comparable to that of the bedroom of a child worse-off than I: barren, save for a few pieces of furniture, in this case, a few tables and a beat-up monochrome television from a time unknown to me.
Once the overwhelming joy of school (I speak sarcastically, here) was behind us for another day, my then best and only friend (another quiet one) and I would travel across the plains that are Johnsonville, in a quest for our secluded sanctuary above yet another boring office cubicle.
Here, we would laugh and play like any other children of the time, a more simplistic time where rolling a small ball across a series of long, worn, wooden tables was enjoyable enough to occupy several hours of our day. Post-ball-rolling, we would fiddle with the various knobs, switches and flashing lights on the old television until we could find a channel we recognised, and, lying on the now multi-purpose tables, we would escape, even from our escape, and become zombies, hypnotised by the flashing screen.
Once we had broken free of our stupor we would depart from our secret space, never to speak of it to anyone.
What I am told were ‘the best years of your life’ were whittled away in that isolated room, and to some, it may seem like those years were wasted as a social outcast, but what do those people know? Thinking back now to my childhood, sitting in this claustrophobic bedroom, the television still blabbing away just as it would in our hiding spot so many years ago, I realise that my life has just begun. In the immortal words of a famous man, the best is yet to come.
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