Deficit

If anyone every took the time to look into the back of a book for all the little quotes that anyone ever wrote, they’d find the million different names hoping to someday be famous. Here in the back of this book, you are truly immortal; you have truly left a stamp on the world. If you could take all these names, and cross-reference them with all the names that ever left the city, that ever flew away. You’d have an incredibly small list.

You’ll find a lot of things jotted on that back page of that chemistry text book. Maybe you’re bored, maybe you’re seeing it as you squiggle your name down beside theirs’. There’s so many different things. It’s a graphologist’s dream: To take all of these signatures and to break down their personalities. You could make a physical journal out of the names in the back of the chemistry book. Thick dots on the “i”s, Issac Martin was an authoritative kind of person. The end of your “y”s loop down, halfway through the next line of writing. Becky Byron was a free thinker.

You take all these names, and you find out what makes them tick, and then you make their own little journal, each individual’s personal agenda. You can make them seem however their letters indicate. However your graphology background defines. You’ll become biased and make sure all signs point to failed fame though, because psychologically speaking, their name being in the back of a chemistry book points to them wishing they were more famous than they are. You make journals and you find peace in it. Making history the way you’d like it, with everyone’s decisions under your own finger tips. You making everyone else’s personal agenda.

In the back of the biology text book you find directions leading from page to page. It’s indirect attention, it doesn’t matter if the writer is there when the reader begins following directions, just as long as some one does.

Turn to page 63

You skim through the article on the complex phosphorus bonds between Nucleic Acids for the next clue as to where to go. Underneath some one’s scrawled words of caution.

Turn to page 98

You’re onto cell structure by now, explanations of different proteins acting through their amino acid bases within cells; facilitating mitosis, allowing flawless cell division, warning about radiation.

Turn to page 132

Onto the production of gametes through meiosis. You feel a little sorry for the three polar bodies that are produced in lieu of an egg. They never even had a chance, never even got the opportunity to become part of the list of names in the back of this book. You take note to feel a little sorry for them in the future.


Turn to page 200

You’re into human reproduction now, it’s the end of the road. Next to the diagram of the penis some one’s written

Faggot

Above the word is a person’s name, recently etched into the page.

Bobby Kerns is

Then an arrow pointing down. Somewhere off to the side of the page Bobby Kerns rebuttal is

Fuck all of you

Good come back Bob.

You flip the book shut. You’ve had your own little adventure today, you’ve seen enough to get you through the night. It’s not something you’d dwell over anyway. Trivial people getting their little slices of immortality on the pages of a biology text book.

You never notice graffiti on the AP calculus text books, never. It’s because the people that have committed that far, committed to actually educating themselves beyond a high school level while still contained in these walls, they’re the ones who already know.

The ones who already understand that they’re not going to get famous.

The ones who understand that they’ve already grown up, and that little Miley Cyrus and Jonas brothers’ sized window of opportunity is already closed. They know they’ll be working at some job they know they won’t like for the rest of their lives. They simply don’t have the heart to write their names in that back of those books.

They won’t be immortal.

Existentially speaking, none of us are.