I was never the kid that had pictures and stickers on the inside of my locker. No band liner note photos. No pictures of scantily clad bikini bodies torn from skin mags and taped haphazardly in the back where the prying eyes of teachers and administrators couldn't penetrate. No sketches of of guns, planes, tanks, and bloody victims. No sketches of knife bearing serpents or hearts with arrows and names of lovers scorned.
I, in fact, rarely even went to my locker. My visits became more seldom by the semester as I started carrying everything I needed, both for school and life. By the second semester of my junior year, I put a few books and a notebooks, maybe some other things I can't remember, and never came back for them. I eventually forgot my locker combination towards the end of the school year. I stopped by it a few times and apprehensively spun the dial to some guessed numbers. I would get frustrated and walk away. I would still stop and stare at it as if maybe that would bring the combination back from the dark corner of my memory. I stopped and stared at my house in the same fashion. I stopped and stared at Aaron's old house on Emerson in the same way.
I was embarrassed to go to the office and admit that I had forgotten. They would now that I hadn't used it in months. They would know that I was stoned. They would just know! When that glorious summer finally arrived. I just left everything in the locker and walked away for good. I thought about coming back and trying to figure out when the custodians would get to my locked lost world on the second floor. Something seemed to awkward and unattainable about this idea. At that age, you tend to avoid awkward situations and don't want to put yourself in strange situations, so I just didn't go back.
I've never told anyone. I had, and still have to this day, haunting dreams that I left something important in there. A sketch or poem in a notebook, a bit of acid, a twenty, hell... maybe even a weapon.
These ominous larger than life nightmares take me right back to that mindset and I very accurately have all those anxieties, hopes, dreams, and fears of that teen age boy. In a way, it's a link to my past, the person I was; high school is a nightmare. In these dreamscapes I become the old me like some sort of born again in reverse. I'm desperately trying to remember the combination still and the anxiety and fear of what may be in there or what I may have lost. I wake up in a frenzy and cold sweat. It takes me some time to realize that it was just a dream and I am no longer that awkward skinny teen ager. I have been replaced by a grown Gen X'er with a hole new set of problems. The combination doesn't matter and what I left behind is long gone. I still wonder what could have been in there from time to time though.
I know I left a library book and imagine to the library it was returned. Maybe the custodians just threw it away. In one of my recent dreams, I became that library book. I was looked up via card catalogue in the Dewey decimal  system, (If there is anyone out there aside from the other guy, I'll take a quick bathroom break while you investigate the meaning of all of that.) a name was written in my interior due back by card, very little interest was shown in me, some pages had previously been dog eared, my columns written in with ink and my words highlighted. Then I was returned to a shelf and locked away in a dark hole for months and forgotten. I think maybe their is a clumsy and glaring metaphor in this dream, but an apt one.
I feel liberated exorcising these demons and hope that maybe these desperate dreams of locker combos and forgotten things are now gone.
 Not a thousand, I know, but this is where this story ends.