My head was spin­ning, my mouth dry. The blar­ing speed of my hear­beat far exceeded the flash­ing lights behind us. Speech­less I was at the thought, the idea, but I knew it would hap­pen. It was hap­pen­ing right before me, and I had no con­trol. Not even the slight­est pos­si­bil­ity of mak­ing it go away, and I was fuck­ing scared.

Embarassed, too. It was such a silly mis­take that I some­times fight an over­whelm­ing urge to just laugh, laugh and laugh. But any will­ing­ness to laugh was over­shad­owed by a deep feel­ing of shame in the pit of my stomach.

I was able to wit­ness another ridicu­lous side of my van­ity, how­ever. On my way there, unable to move my arms, the biggest con­cern in my mind was whether or not I would get to keep my clothes, because aside from the hor­ri­ble, ridicu­lous cir­cum­stances, I was at least phys­i­cally com­fort­able. I prob­a­bly should have been think­ing a hun­dred other things, but that laugh­able thought per­me­ated my mind, for what rea­son I don't understand.

The van­ity wouldn't last for long, though. Once I arrived, some­thing clicked in my mind that said, "This is real, jack­ass." And very real it was. It was exactly like I had imag­ined, yet wished I would never actu­ally know.

It truly was a ter­ri­fy­ing expe­ri­ence. Being con­stantly watched, unable to trust oth­ers around you, being.…contained. And I stayed in the lobby the whole time. I will never under­stand how so many peo­ple are able to do that for so long, and seem­ing have no prob­lem with that. I was there for four­teen hours and I had a huge prob­lem with it.

Sit­ting there in limbo, unable­un­will­ing to sleep. God, I was scared. Around 5am I started to feel sick, but it couldn't be helped. As the hours slowly passed, the hor­ri­ble feel­ings in my heart trans­lated to my mind and my stom­ach, com­pound­ing until it felt almost unbearable.

And yet I sat there, being a good lit­tle boy. Afraid to speakafraid to move.…watching the clock, pray­ing for time to either speed up or cycle back sev­eral hours so I could avoid the sit­u­a­tion, but I couldn't.

Finally I was res­cued, and a small cel­e­bra­tion was had with pizza. When asked about the "expe­ri­ence", I replied with an expres­sion that floated around in my mind the whole time:

I had planned on writ­ing this entry my first nite home, some­what rehears­ing how things would be said. The plans have all but been forgotten.…I couldn't do it, per­haps because it was still too close, and there­fore still stung­bad. Since the ordeal is behind me now, I'm left with actu­ally learn­ing the les­son, which won't soon be for­got­ten by yours truly. Okay, pro­cras­ti­na­tion finally hurt me. You coulda just made me a card­board sign, ya know.

Salami sand­wiches, orange pants and match­ing soda. One of the worst nights of my entire life.