People Watching: A study of despair amidst beauty
So I was really early for my meeting at the college today - about an hour. Must learn to read my own handwriting. Being ever-ready for such events, I had a book in the car with me. So, I found a good parking spot adjacent to the school and a park, with a pleasant view of sun-dappled fall trees aflame with reds and oranges, the mountains in the misty background, and a baseball diamond on the far side of the park. I settled myself in to read and enjoy the warm fall breeze.
After some time I looked up, and saw a boy wandering around in the park. He was quite young, maybe nineteen, but I'd guess two years younger. He was dressed in loose white slacks, with a navy blue blazer and a straight black necktie worn in a loose, dangly knot. He was pale, but I'd guess he had some arab or greek ancestry, as his hair was a mass of curly black ringlets worn long over the forehead and trimmed short on the sides. He had both hands shoved deep in his pants pockets and was wandering aimlessly, staring off into space. He looked right at me for a little while, but he wasn't seeing me, or the cars in the parking lot, or the girl with the yappy little terrier on the sidewalk.
He looked so goddamn sad. It struck me that this kid would look perfectly at home in 1988, and I turned the radio to a station that plays music from twenty years back. A Sir Elton John from back in the days before he'd been knighted started singing to me what I can't help but hear as "hold me closer, Tony Danza." The boy stood about a hundred yards off into the park, in a sunny patch of impossibly green grass under an impossibly blue October sky, looking up at the sky, his profile to me. I swear I saw a tear on his smooth cheek. I wondered what on Earth could make a handsome young man like that, in such a beautiful setting, seem so hollowed out. Like his very soul had been gouged out with a rusty ice-cream scoop. He seemed to have enough sorrow in him for a man of eighty years, or more.
Boy George was asking if I really wanted to hurt him now, and I wondered if the disc jockey had the same view I did. It worked with the scene almost too well, like I was watching an old John Cusack movie. The boy was strolling toward the baseball diamond, moving each foot with the finality of a man leaving home with no hope of ever coming back. He held his head high, but seemed to be carrying, no dragging a weight too great to measure.
A bluejay flew by, chirping madly, and knocked a yellow and gold spray of leaves off one of the nearby trees, which the warm breeze pushed across the scene like an artist who wanted to keep painting, but was afraid of ruining an already perfect picture. The boy spent some time in the outfield, moving from right field to left as though if he were to stop he would just lie down and die, but since he had no place left to go he was giving the idea some thought.
The Bangles started singing that the leaves were brown, and the sky was a hazy shade of Winter, proving that the disc jockey was looking out his window at a very different scene indeed. The boy, meanwhile, was facing away from me, toward the infield. I imagined a look of longing on his face, as if he wanted to go there, but knew he belonged where he was. Outfield, away from the game, alone in the green. Ignored by the fans, resented by his teammates. Nah, I thought. Sports metaphors weren't cutting it. Besides, the boy was leaving the ball diamond now, was taking off his jacket. The shirt underneath was a white button-up job with an oversize collar, and no sleeves. His arms were thin, and I realized how the jacket had hidden how very gaunt he was.
Maybe this was a ghost. Haunting the park in dazzling broad daylight, this was a shade from the eighties, forced to remember some great sin, some awful deed that he either did, or had done to him. Year after year he would walk this park, growing more and more emaciated. Consumed from within by despair and sorrow, until the burden of grief became too great, and he could bring himself to walk no more. His spirit would never know rest, would only one day abandon the quest for answers. He would lie uneasy in his grave, too wasted away by his endless torment to wander, and too miserable to care.
The boy lay down in the shade of a century-old oak, and made a crude pillow out of his jacket.
Huey Lewis began crooning about how he wanted a new drug, and I turned the radio off. It simply wasn't cooperating anymore.
I went back to my book, but couldn't shake the image of the sad anachronistic boy in the park. I looked up, and he was gone.

That would actually have been pretty cool, and a great way to end a story, but ten minutes later when I was going in to the meeting, I saw the kid coming out of the men's room. October ghost stories rarely incorporate a potty break.