I look at the screen. Raise my reading glasses above my eyes, lower them, raise, lower… I can’t tell. Sure, they’re better for reading even though they’re scratched, old, these reading glasses with the black/ice blue frames that I bought a few years ago at a dollar store with my friend Tuesday, who is much younger than me and now blind due to diabetes and I haven’t talked to since living with him at Maitri, these reading glasses that work fine for reading but make the font on the screen far too real, far to contrived. I take them off and set them on my cluttered nightstand. They remind me of him and I don’t know how to reach him. He was such a beautiful boy, a strong boy, watching him go blind was more painful for me it seems, but he never really let on. We all just lived there in the hospice, and died if we were ready. When. When we were ready. When they were.
I wasn’t.
I heard about a year ago that he made it out alive, one of the only that I knew and liked, truly liked, that lived. Thirteen dead in twelve months. Fill up the empty space to be made empty again. Hell, we’re all just energy anyway, empty space and light. Tuesday was most certainly light, with his bleached white hair and his street-hustler wit. He could barely see himself but was worried about over-bleaching his hair. We all grasped the most ridiculous things to remember that we were human, remember who we were before…
But who am I now? Buried so deep above ground, losing myself to keep myself alive, but I lived and now… now I have forgotten how to live. It seems so damn wrong, so backwards. I fought to survive so that I can live, wake up early every morning and scream at the day “Give it ALL to me, I’m ready!” run out the door and not look back until the day and night and I am done. I want to write the story of the survivor, the “miracle” as the doctors and nurses called me, but I need to BECOME again, to reach, to fly, to dig down deep for a passion that is buried somewhere inside of me and rip it out of my chest, look at it closely and simply say “Oh, there you are. Lets fuck shit up again, set the world, any world, any dream, any size alight. NOW”.
Any moment now, any day. I mean come ON, it’s not like I didn’t work for it, fight for it with my life, with everything I had inside of me to give and more, to make it through the pain and the days and nights and weeks of wanting to die and just have it all over with to give up now, to forget why I am here, to finally have the burning ends of the candle meet in the middle. It can’t be like this, but it is.
I loathe people who think they deserve things for any reason that has to do with the way life is, the people who say “I gave a dollar to the homeless guy, I’m nice, I didn’t yell at the asshole who ripped me off because I know Karma will come to my rescue, so why does bad stuff keep happening to me?” Fuck you, you’re an idiot. That’s why. You shape the life you live in, you create the world around you, and quite honestly, I think that Karma is nothing but ourselves knowing we did something wrong instinctively so manifesting something wrong to make us feel better about ourselves – and/or, the ways of those who taught us being so far steeped in our psyche (wow, no personal issues with the people who raised me here) that in order to completely break free of them we create something that we know they will never, ever in their lives accept. We’re just finally giving them a reason to not accept us that we can understand. Substitute ‘you’ and ‘we’ in the above diatribe for ‘I’ and ‘me’, and we’re getting closer… but where was I? Oh yeah. Deserving things. Having a “right”.
Inside of me there is a battle between two forces. One that says that I now have a right to rest, but another, stronger one that dreadfully misses and wants back the person who could feel his heart beating with such a passion inside of his chest that he cried at the perfect words to a song, that ran outside of his tent in Austin to dance naked and alone in the rain because that’s what he felt like doing, the person who didn’t let anything stop him from wanting to be more, who loathed contentment and comfort, who was unafraid to spread his wings and jump.
Is that it? Am I afraid for some reason now? Or am I just weary?
There is the language of far too many unwritten dreams inside of me, the insatiable desire to show the world how wonderful it really still is, even with all the shit happening around us, and just simply be the spark that ignites it all. I want to instigate, to inspire myself and others, to wake every morning and KNOW that the world is mine, is OURS. To Fuck Shit Up.
Is that so much to ask?
I worked for it, and goddamn it, I deserve it. So two years in a bed took their toll. So I don’t have the energy I once did because of it. Things have been getting better, I will admit that. When I moved into my third floor apartment I could barely make it up the stairs, but now I don’t think twice about taking three at a time. I look at pictures to remind me of what I went through, and that helps a little bit… but I also remember who I was, just flesh wrapped around dreams, will, and a passion for life, for something better, and realize that at 2pm I am still in bed writing this.
Perhaps this is my wake-up call. The introspective rant that reminds me that I need to write, to run, to live, to breathe, to stretch everything I have so that the pain of it wakes me up again, and I can stretch further without fear. To be the person I know is somewhere inside for me, to be a better man for the beautiful someone who is almost exactly who I wished for. The desire to survive doesn’t end with just simply staying alive, and I’ve gotten to comfortable, too complacent. I am a creator, a creator of me, over and over again. I am a chameleon, I am somehow immortal – but mortality is a ruse. A hoax. We are light, we are energy, and energy never ceases to exist…
Time to tear off these mental burial cloths, spit out the dirt, and fucking breathe life again. It is time to live.
I just need to remember how.
