Michael in the dark wood

The sun had set, but the moon would not rise for three hours. Michael Sullivan walked to the window and stared out to the dark wood outside. He lived in the uppermost floor of a college dormitory which stood six stories tall, holding back the forest like a dark green sea behind.

A layer of fog had moved in from the ocean and hidden the stars from the university campus on the hill, of which Michael's dormitory was a part. He retreated from the view, back to his desk. He sat and read back what he had written minutes before:

Without a clear conception of the proper path, Roger felt himself lost. Although Roger did not know which way to go, he did realize his lack of direction. If he had the failing of being unsure of the proper course; at least he knew of his shortcomings, unlike the great number of his fellows for whom ignorance was a welcome bliss.

That was where he had stopped. Michael felt he was lost in his own words. The words on the page were for Helen Zachary, for the novel he intended to write for her. Helen Zachary was Michael's TA in his Introduction to American Fiction class, and he was very much in love with her.

Michael didn't know what the novel was to be about, exactly. He wanted his novel to make her able to understand him. How could he write the novel so she would comprehend his feelings?  

Unable to answer that question, Michael rose again and looked at his calendar. He saw that it was the middle day of the middle week of the middle quarter of his first year at college, and he had still never gotten drunk, never had a group of friends and never kissed a girl.

He had seen all three of these things happening around him in the dorm he lived in at the University of California, Santa Zita. The day he and the other freshman had moved in, they had started drinking, partying, hanging out, but not with him. Somehow, by the way he looked and acted, they had seen he didn't fit in, and their new life had begun without him.

Michael attended classes, wrote papers, ate at the dining hall, but except for occasional brief conversations with his floor mates, he had no social life. Not that they were unfriendly to him. They just had a way of speaking and moving around him that told Michael he was not a part of their world.

Time had passed quickly. Already halfway through winter quarter. Halfway! And he was no closer to doing any of the things that his hall-mates took for granted, that they had been doing since high school, or even before. And worse, he saw no way out of the rut he was in. None of the cheerful pamphlets the university administration had handed out to them mentioned how to be accepted, how to find out where the parties are and how to show up at them and be welcomed.

Michael looked again at his calendar, marking the day with a finger: Wednesday, the middle of the month, the middle of February, the middle of winter quarter-Valentine's Day, which on Michael's calendar was marked by a puffy red heart.

That morning, the two girls who lived down the hall that Michael thought were the prettiest and popular girls on his floor, Amy Mulligan and Sara Kestler, had both received bouquets of flowers. After dinner, through some communications network that Michael was not plugged into, it had become known that the dorm was going to party that night. In his journey to and from the library that night, he had seen groups of freshmen roaming from floor to floor, carrying beers and laughing, with their arms around each other and holding hands. It was an eventful Valentine's Day, but not for him.

Standing and pushing the chair away with the backs of his knees, Michael looked out the window. Because it was dark out and the room light was on, he saw nothing but his own reflection. Two dark, serious eyes looked back at him, under dark brown mop-like hair that he had never figured out how to get cut. Not the kind of face that girls like Sara or Amy would have given a second glance.

He might have tried to spend more time figuring out who had sent Amy the flowers-the thin upperclassman who lived in of the floor’s two singles, or the tall, blonde guy who was friends with Andy-but he didn’t care as much any more. His life was now guided by a new star. A star, Michael thought sardonically, was the right word. Bright, remote and unreachable. But still, just as the ancients had improved their civilization trying to understand celestial bodies they would never be able to visit, he held on to his dream.