Red 04 (Harvard (A Hopeless Story))

His dream had been Harvard. It had always been Harvard, as far back as he could remember. His father had taken him there, as a child, and the sheer stature of the place, the smell of it, the feel of the campus and the intelligence of the chatter all hooked him, all grabbed him by the cheek and reeled him in. His vision could not have been more focused, his scope not even an inch more narrow. Everything he did, he did with the intent of admission. He read non-stop. He devoured his textbooks. He leapt over grade levels. He joined clubs and he volunteered. He read up on ways of gilding his application. He surrendered free time and fun and contentment and fulfillment all to reach his singular brass ring goal.
And when he received the slender envelope, his world fell apart.
He became very despondent, suddenly without purpose and devastated at the loss of his dream. He wasn't sure how to proceed, how to cope with all the wasted time, all the wasted effort. He'd spent so long working toward just getting into the school that he'd expended very little thought on just what he'd do once he got there. He didn't have an endgame in mind, just an opening move... and it had been denied him.
He sat in his room listening to the kind of mopey music he'd avoided when still striving for Harvard. It struck him how very tenuous ambition was, how easy it could be to have the rug pulled out from under you. He decided, listening to sad bastard songs and counting the plaster dimples in the ceiling, that all dreams come to the same conclusion. The timeframe might vary, but no matter what you hope for, eventually it crumbles underneath your feet and leaves you stunned on shattered on your back. He decided to never dream again, to take whatever life would give him without concern and without judging its value. He decided to never give a damn again.
And what slipped out of him at that point of surrender was smoky and strange and more aware of its surroundings than anthropomorphic expunged hope has any right to be. It had a vaguely human shape, if only because that's what it was used to being. It sat next to its former host and tried to console him. But there was no use in the attempt. The separation of his hope was just another event in a life full of events. There was nothing to get excited about. It didn't matter either way. His hope hung around for a bit, and after realizing just how dull its host was without it, flittered away leaving him alone, dulled, remorseless and without a hint of passion.
Without that vampiric creature draining him of the ability to accept mediocrity, his life suddenly became much easier, even as it was less worth living. Without the spikes and valleys of hope, the most maddening things were leveled and uninteresting, as smooth and bland and cold as ice milk. He would have said he enjoyed it if were capable of it, but as he wasn't, he merely noted that it was fine and went about his new daily routine. With the dream of Harvard demolished, he set about finding a job. Whereas, once, the hope of doing something grand and meaningful with his life would have made him miserable in a grind of worthless tedium, now, he was able to immerse himself in the most useless of white collar jobs. For eight and a half hours every day, he plugged figures and data into a computer and generated untold numbers spreadsheets, charts and inventories that were looked at with quick and resolute disinterest by superiors that couldn't have cared much less about the reports or whatever drone of theirs it was that was making them. It was all quite futile, and the paychecks he drew never provided him an ounce of fulfillment, which, in another lifetime, would have seemed unconscionable. When the workday was over, he would plod unerringly home in order to catch programs on the television that didn't offend, provoke or entertain him as much as they did occupy the hours until he was able to go to sleep. Weekends, with their freeform lack of structure were a bit more confounding, but he was able to fill the void handily with a great deal of sitting and staring straight ahead and waiting for either death or sleep to end the day.
His hope, meanwhile, freed from the shackles of its myopic former jailer, was aglow with the liberty of being able to do anything at all. Being without the constraints of a body, too, had a powerful effect... and his hope was able to see all the sights of the world, from Cairo to Greece to the Outback to London to Rio to the Sahara to Montreal to Lisbon to Laos to Madagascar to Antarctica to Botswana to China to Spain to Cleveland. It was quite a tour and as broadening to the mind as something could be to a thing that was, really, not in possession of a real mind at all. And while his hope was capable of being in all these places and, in whatever way a misty body of human wish was able to take in the sights, take in the sights, without the senses of its former body, his hope was unable to truly experience anything. Even though it had passion and desire to spare, his hope was just as passive in its interaction with life as its hopeless body was all inert and waiting on the couch.
The tantalizing breadth of the world just out of its reach was demoralizing. With every passing day, the dreariness of watching with interest and without impact became more and more intolerable. Without hands, it couldn't write of its experiences, without a mouth, it was unable to convey them to anyone in speech. Without eyes and without ears and without nerves to connect all the things together, so much of what it longed to engage was cut off from it. It was physically incapable of creating anything, of expressing anything, of doing anything besides just wanting to do something. It was a being of pure interest unable to impact the world it was so interested in. As time passed and the futility of it, the dreariness of it, the constantly dashed wishes of it became too much to bear, his hope acted in quite a similar fashion to the man that had spawned it. It decided to never dream or wish or want again. And his hope, without hope, became hopeless and thus vanished.
And if he had noticed that his long gone hope had suddenly ceased to be, he never showed it. He continued on his path, day in and day out without change, without want, without sadness or anger or pity or happiness or laughter or joy. He did nothing to speak of, so he didn't, and he waited out his days like so many of the hopeless around him.
One day, he came across that slender letter that had changed his life. Looking at it, reading the words printed so politely on the page, he wondered why he had ever tried at all, and why such a thing had ever been so thrilling and so upsetting to him. He tried to let the memories stir him, but of course, they couldn't. He wadded up the letter and tossed it in the trash.
He wondered if there was anything worth watching on television, decided it didn't matter and watched it anyways.

THE END.