Lower Sixth Existentialism Club

Feeling inspired to go back to the drawing board on a previously abandoned story.
This is its current state, trite but with potential:

The Lower Sixth Existentialist Society

“In summary, I contest that the human condition is essentially perplexing and fraught with pain and misery, and any attempt to break through the fog consists of an active act of forgetting or self deceit.”

So concluded the first meeting of The Lower Sixth Existentialist Society to a smattering of self-conscious applause. An after-school gathering of adolescents slumped on plastic chairs in their regulation charcoal uniform, held in a small sage green room. By the window, licked in afternoon sunlight is the speaker, Mark Leadon. His face is gaunt and peppered with acne, his eyes sunken and dull. In his shoulders lies a weariness of a much older man but the corners of his mouth betray an impishness as yet unquashed by the weight of the despondency and terror that have become his companions. Before the last polite flickers of clapping die out he gets up and leaves the room without bringing his eyes from the floor.
There wasn’t a bad turnout. It had almost been a whimsical venture, this new group. Considering the amount he had thought about it, the actualisation of this particular scheme was sudden and relatively spontaneous. A few well-placed flyers, some gathered sympathisers. Boredom and curiosity had drawn the rest from the school woodwork. People with late trains to catch or difficult family situations. Loners and the maladjusted seemed to be the ideal captive audience for his philisophical ponderings.
Mark had spent half the night distilling the few expressable thoughts from the mulch and tangle of his psyche. Neurotic biro stream-of-consciousness led to typewriter clacking, the enthusiasm of which threatened to wake his parents from their snoring slumber. There is no purpose to our lives but that we make ourselves, we are our own destiny. Pithy quasi-revelations such as this looked to him just regurgitations of hungrily digested second-hand paperbacks. However, en masse they appeared to gather form, an identity of their own. His philosophy stepped forward from the shadows, still a silhouette but distinct, separate. Mark found himself able to give voice to this. He yearned to share his thoughts, and to hear others. But this first meeting, if it happened, would be a mission statement. He would lay his soul bare, to be accepted or shunned, whichever fate decided. There is no fate but in retrospect, patterns in the dust, that is the sum of all perceived meaning. No force pulls us together or guides us. Instead we drift in the wind of time and causality, a dingy in a rainstorm, it’s captain blind and guileless, reading poetry in Braille from the sand that sticks rough on the ship’s bow.
Now outside, the fading light is scraped with woollen clouds. Morphing forms grasped out of random moisture pockets in an empty heaven. A three-legged dog, grey and old. A doorway.
He pulls out his notepad and searches for a pen. Whatever crossed his mind has gone over to the other side, the dark recess where memories lay to rest and idle wonderings go on holiday only to return in arbitrary intervals.
He thinks of her now. Her face a mirror to him. Her soul pressed against the glass of her cornea. He could feel it. Her anima raw and pure, his archetypal opposite. The remembered yearning for their physical communion, but more for the continuing of their psychic melding. Oh yes the early chapters of love. But that was gone now.
He was a solitary man. Maybe it could have been otherwise but some difficult shadow in him sabotaged any chance of happiness or normality. Nothing would satisfy him as much as the lonely joy of sitting in the black mist of a winter car park watching the streetlights parody the moon. He wanted nothing more than to be in Paris, smoking over un petit café with just his thoughts for comfort and the crisp kiss of the spring morning.
This was its substitute. Walking through the park with fists shoved deep into pockets, head down. The trees embracing cold limbs above. If he had worked at it he could have been popular. People liked him but viewed him as odd. He would utter desperate psalms of spiritual ruin over canteen fish and chips. He had forgotten how to smile or talk to people without thinking about how he was standing.
Mark’s studies were flagging. His attention in lessons was dulled by cyclic thoughts of formless pessimism. Suicide is nothing but the distant dream of clear-thinking men, who said that? He dreamt about it but could not linger upon the act. No, it was the result. A doorway into void. The absence of pleasure and pain seemed the closest resemblance of a happy ending he could envisage.
Yet there were things he loved and he felt occasional surges that were not experienced by most. A grin of rust on a pipe. A leaf floating in an oil capped puddle. Sights such as this brought a crescendo of tremors through his torso, played a merry glissando on his heartstrings. Yet these were fleeting moments, uninhabitable islands in a vast numb ocean. Mark attempted to record the ripples in words or through a camera lens, but either his skill was wanting or nature’s beauty wore a veil that saved its essence from capture.