As a teenager, I was hopeless, forlorn, and despondent beyond repair.

I was a tiny bit social my freshman year of high school, but mostly just retreated into books and bologna sandwiches in the school library as hives of classmates buzzed in hives in the cafeteria.  

Soon after I got my driver’s license, I headed out to a theater in the Chicago suburbs. Before the show, I paced outside the theater entrance, puffing cigarettes while reading a creased paperback of Kurt Vonnegut’s early science fiction. I must have looked miserable as hell.

A bespectacled adult with kind eyes also lingered outside. He asked me what was wrong.

“Nothing, nothing,” I muttered with stereotypical adolescent angst.

“You know, someday it’s going to get better,” he told me. “It might not all fall into place for whatever you have imagined now, but at your age you can’t imagine everything and someday it’s going to get better.”

I stared silently.

“Trust me.”

The reassurance boosted my spirits during the play, a one-man show adapting C.S. Lewis, most likely “The Screwtape Letters.”

But when I was driving home, I stopped to grab a coffee at a gas station--a sugary Irish coffee with suspended particles. It flipped over as I turned out onto the road, splashing onto the passenger side floorboard.

I reached over to try to retrieve it. Slippery, it eluded my grasp. I reached further and further down until--bam!--the car slammed into a utility pole.

My father was an impatient, irritable, and sometimes wrathful man who did not brook disappointment kindly. I feared returning home. So I disembarked from the totaled car, smoke rising from the crumbled hood, and trudged through marshland onto nearby train tracks.

I trekked and trekked along the shifting gravel mound, eventually making my way two towns over. Walking through the desolate downtown in the middle of the night, I thought briefly about smashing my fist through the glass window of a gun shop and ending it all. Quickly abandoning that idea, I hiked out into a nearby wilderness reserve and lied down, exhausted.

Fearing my father’s rage, I ended up spending a few days out there. When sunlight suffused everything, I wandered around and read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke paperbacks I had stuffed into my pockets. When night fell, I rolled around in the prairie grass, trying to find a comfortable position to sleep.

Dehydrated and delirious from lack of sleep after a few days, I still dreaded heading home.

But the stranger’s words rang in my skull about how it was going to get better, eventually, someday surely. He was probably misguided but maybe there was a little kernel of truth in there somewhere.

I pulled myself up and started walking.

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Joseph S. Pete can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nwi_jsp or at the Northwest Indiana Literary Journal