When he was a little boy, Cameron was devoted to exploring the world with his entire being. He would spin in circles until he was dizzy, and then try to fix things by spinning the other way. He would hang upside down from the monkey bars of the playground, eliciting shrieks from his mother.

He would sprint up the staircase at the subway, never understanding why mother always opted to take the escalator instead. The stairs were clearly the superior option: Elevation! Speed! What a rush, and no grumpy old adults blocking your way.

Once he boarded the train, he’d give everybody a great show– spinning round and round the pole, jumping and grabbing the grab handles (which were just out of his reach), and he’d swing to and fro. “Stop being such a monkey,” mother would plead.

But in those moments, Cameron could think of nothing else he’d rather be.

Parenting is never easy, but Cameron presented a greater challenge than most. He was intelligent, he was quick, he was difficult to stay mad at. His cheeky smile charmed the stern looks off the faces of everybody he’d met.

But, of course, he’d create messes everywhere he went. It wasn’t personal– his mind was somewhere else before he was done with whatever he was in the middle of.

And while he was often inattentive (distracted, really, by all the goings-on of the world around him), his attention was always precious. He would look at you with his piercing, twinkling eyes, and you’d feel like he was taking you in, in a way that few children really do. So you couldn’t help but look out for him in a crowd of children, and find yourself trying to catch his gaze.

_

When he was a teenager, Cameron fell in love. With pretty much one in every four girls that he met. Half of them weren’t very attractive, and half of those who were left weren’t very intelligent. So if a girl was decent looking, and could express an interesting thought or two, Cameron was all over her.

He was particularly fixated with Kimberly from Track-and-Field. She had a tattoo around her ankle, which was some sort of profound Latin quote about bastards and getting down. Kimberly, of course, didn’t really notice Cameron, and would move on in life without ever knowing of his fleeting-yet-intense desire to discuss The Beatles with her. (Kimberly was more into 90’s pop-punk.)

Mother never taught Cameron how to be around girls. She had assumed, wrongly, that he would just figure it all out himself. After all, he was great at making friends, he was gregarious and charming. Cameron would never really have a proper girlfriend. He did, however, single-handedly perform an informal analysis of the distribution of musical interests of teenage girls. (He was always surprised at the number of them who listened to “Um, I gotta go.”)

Cameron never really did well in school. He was never really sure of what he wanted. Mother was always nagging him to study hard, that he was so smart, if only he applied himself. Cameron would simply smile and shrug, and just keep walking. He knew that he owed everything to Mother– she worked two jobs just to pay the bills, and she never had any time for herself. But somehow that just made him resent her internally, and it seemed to take up all his energy just to put on a brave, civil front for her.

Sometimes, after failing a test particularly badly, Cameron would snarl at himself in the mirror. “Why don’t you fucking study, you bastard? It’s so easy. It’s just books. It’s just paper. You got this. YOU GOT THIS.”

It never lasted more than a couple of days. ANd his eyes never really twinkled anymore.

_

When he was a young adult, Cameron was sort-of broken. Or maybe he just never learned to function effectively. “But does anybody, really?” he wondered to himself, before thinking, “That is so cheesy, dude.”

He had some buddies that he’d play poker with, but he never really cared about the same things that they cared about. He met one of them (Pete) while working odd jobs after school, and he just kept hanging out with them after. He was drifting with nowhere to go, and they were nowhere in particular.

They would meet in a dingy old house at the end of town– someone’s parents both worked the night shift, and somehow didn’t seem to mind that the house was always smelling of cheap beer, stale pizza and half-stubbed cigarette buds when they came back in the morning. (Cameron would often cycle his rickety old bicycle home, with badly-inflated tires and lousy brakes, mildly intoxicated and smoking his last cigarette. A part of him always wondered if he would get into an accident, but the roads were always empty at 4am.)

The boys– they were all talking about how they were going to get back at their parents, at their ex-girlfriends, at their bosses, at the Universe. They were going to catch a break, make it big, get out of this shithole.

Cameron didn’t see the point. The shithole was everywhere, as far as he was concerned. The shithole was at once Home and the Great Unknown. Holes, filled with shit, as far as the eye could see. He just wondered if the world would ever seem worth exploring again.

Sometimes there was a girlfriend or two, and Cameron would study them as they sat on their boyfriends laps in their awkwardly short shorts and excessive eye makeup. Why were they even here? What did they see in his deadbeat friends? “Well, what do YOU see in them?” he thought to himself.

“Familiarity,” came the answer.

Did that mean that this… was home? He watched as one of the girls– short blonde hair, with a t-shirt of a band she had probably never heard of– made a big gesture of kissing her boyfriend. The sight and sounds of their mingling tongues reminded him weirdly of some swamp monsters in some B-grade film. His stomach churned.

“I fold,” he coughed as he tossed his cards and stumbled out of his chair. “I gotta go… I’ll be…” The rest of them barely glanced at him. Pete was already dealing the next round of cards.

“I gotta get out of here,” he thought to himself as he raced down the street. The night hummed with the vaguest of hopes.