Bottom of the Barrel

I am officially broke. I do not know how to pay for the next bill. Something as simple as lunch will take a few minutes to decide on whether its more economical to "skip."

Soon after that, depression.

This might be tough. Might.

Elegy of the Comfort Zone

Two days ago on the second anniversary of my arrival in Houston on the very same day... I lost my job.

I don't really know what to do.

Except for to follow some words one of my best friends uttered as he sat facing the deep blue seemingly limitless stretch of Atlantic glistening beneath the pale full moon tonight on a 1500 mile long conversation with me...

"Chase the dream. Hardship begets greatness."

Therein lies my compass.

In the Morning

There was this promise that was made
[the quiet talking-to-yourself-out-loud kind]
That no more sad words were to be said in this journal
[like absolutely none]
That we'd try not to have to cling to memories to alleviate
the loneliness
and guilt
and longing
and jealousy
and regret

But I found the last sad song to sing
[you know the words to this one]
Its in the [he]art. See I get lost in it
[and sometimes I'm convinced I let myself]

To put pencil to paper and let it glide across
as if guided by an unseen presence
Hours will go by before I force myself
to have to breath and stop [think about]

creating.

I consider myself lucky in doing what i love doing
and do it every day [every day]

Do what I do without worry or wanting
without goal or grief
restraint or relevance

to what is happening
how I'm feeling
or those out there enveloped
in their own lives and experiences

And in the midst of all this created happiness...
the deepest longing
[the thing we all seek but are always to stupid to admit we need]
is just one [ONE just one] person to share it all with

Someone who will care not only in this moment
but the next one too
[and if you're lucky at least maybe the moment after that]

What a beautiful thing it is to know
In the final moments of consciousness
on any given day [night] chock full of
happiness
regret
fear
longing
obligation
restraint
frustration
bliss
peace [and all the other residents
in the spectrum of human emotion
we are all guilty of mouthing off about
but don't have a terribly firm understanding of]

that you'd have that person
whose eyes you can look into and get lost in
before you slip away...

...and that they will be there
right beside you in the morning

to bring it all back again

Liar

I saw a man today walking along the sidewalk path just in front of the car. His clothes were worn and his posture sullen indicating the shear weight burdening him from his backpack slung across his left shoulder. His jacket told stories of the harsh weather of days past, of the empty bottles that slept at his side and in his company during cold rainy nights and the driest of days in the sweltering summer. Beneath which hid what was once seemingly a white shirt, a red circle lazily screened across its chest with bluish green spokes emanating from a central point, an indiscernible insignia. He wore the brim of his hat high along the crown of his forehead, revealing an unyielding determination in his line of sight. And though he walked steadily and solidly, the holes in his olive brown shoes exhibited his tired, unwashed feet beyond the thin fabric and incompletely tied laces strewn about and swinging forward and back with each stride.

And yet he walked. His eyes were so very forward, squinting as if to see that all his work was not in vain, that his destination lay just beyond the next horizon. There were no distractions, just a perseverance to arrive at his destination. Southbound. The sun had started to his left and will inevitably end at his right as he continues on, nothing on earth to him save for what covered him at the moment, the handful of belongings in his sack and the stories playing constantly in his head, as vivid as his spirit would permit. He had no friends to keep tabs on. No one in sight to care about, to be hurt by, to abandon. And with no one to abandon him but the setting sun. But he kept on without apprehension, reserve or hesitation. He knows a very different kind of peace.

And in the moment, I wanted to be him.

***

I don't have many hopes. I have fewer wishes. I don't have a dream.

I harbor no jealousies and entertain no false assumptions. I am a good person. I am a worthy friend. I am sinless. I find loss to be a source of strength, not weakness. I don't remember every little thing. I forgive easily and feel that this is a just existence. I am comfortable in my own skin and am easy in the company of others. I do no judge those around me. I do not filter my thoughts, and I keep my emotions hidden beyond the sight of those closest to me. I am always on time and can be depended on for anything. I do not fear failure. Home is just another place to me. I know all the answers to my deepest questions and light shines on every corner of my mind. And above all…in the surreal aftermath of reaching my quarter century, I can attempt to say that I know exactly what I am doing, where I am going and who I am. But that is the biggest lie of all.

I’m still that nerdy, insecure, fat kid seeking desperately for his rightful place in the big picture.

But I am waiting patiently for the last sad song to sing.

Rest in Pieces

I'm sad today. The deep, unrelenting kind. I can't stop thinking about it and it is keeping me from doing what it is I have to. Just need it to stop already.

Consumed.

And I hope that writing it down will help.

Need to Stop Looking

The Beaujolais-Villages Nouveau from Maison Albert Bichot was what was exactly needed at the moment. With Christmas week’s worth of pain shooting through my upper back in a spiraling web of misery and the stress of cancelled flights and constantly entertained ideas of my termination at work waiting for me on Tuesday morning, I needed something to dull it all. And despite the much needed ease of distraction State College brought to me this Christmas, the entire ordeal of coming home has revealed to me the kind of person I am inevitably to become: paranoid, obsessive, nervous, longing and lonely. But knowing that never helps. Writing about it does. Sometimes.

I hadn’t had it that long. And when it came, I wasn’t even looking for it, it just happened to be there when I wasn’t seeking it, but later realized it was what I really needed at that time. It wasn’t exactly a wallet per se. It wasn’t just a money clip. It was both things; it was everything I needed it to be. The clever compartment system and slim construction as well as the different features that made it convenient and aesthetically beautiful made it something I needed to have. There wasn’t really much time between when I got it and when I couldn’t live without it; as soon as I left the Gap, all of the most important things went into that wallet. My credit cards, my ID, my UFO card, a note from a friend written when I had first moved here wishing me luck. It was just a beautiful thing. Slim enough to carry around everywhere, had just enough space for the things I needed to have with me.

I can’t recall everything that happened which is essentially what leads to the losing of important things. I got drunk again. That’s it. And once again, I forget to watch myself and more importantly the things I do and then eventually misplace it. All I can remember in the aftermath is just how important it was to me and the bit of hope I clung to that I didn’t really lose it…and that it was just laying around somewhere. I took it for granted…or something like that, but I’m not sure.

All I can remember are the memories from each of those artifacts…how the fucking bartender kept my bankcard that one night because she didn’t like how little we tipped (she sucked). Or how the address and birthdate on the License were wrong. Or how the $6.00 left was from the thick book of $250.00 that so easily slipped into the clip not three weeks ago. Or even how reassuring it was to have that thing in my pocket all the time, so snug, so compact, so natural and convenient.

But it’s gone now. It has been. I know it is. Every now and then I’ll look under the couch or in the car and for some reason have the false hope that it would be there…but as always, I just forget that it’s gone. I just need to breathe and learn to let it go.

I’ve called and replaced both of my cards. I’m going to get the ID this weekend. And I can settle for having lost the $6.00 clipped to its side. Cringing to the idea that someone else has my wallet now, probably using that money God knows where and for what, I’ll never want to know.

It’s destroyed me knowing it’s out there somewhere right now…but I almost wish I don’t find it again. I hope even more that I don’t keep looking for it every chance I get. Because the sooner I might find it and hold it in my hands once more, regardless of all the worth it still has to me…the sooner I can lose it all over again.

And it would be my fault. All over again.

The Night the Birds Fell From the Sky

My eyes opened at twilight. The empty city was bathed in the ghastly glow of diminishing bursts of light from abandoned streets and dimly illuminated windowsills. The quiet roll of waning thunder and the glorific medical center lights beyond the silhouette of trees just outside the window were all that could be seen beneath the blanket of darkness creeping out of the city.

I woke up on a porch somewhere in Houston. Now, I know exactly where, [my cousin’s apartment], but instead of a comforting familiarity to welcome me back to consciousness, I instead felt an lingering uneasy sense of betrayal, abandonment, and foreign, merciless vindication. As if we had somehow merited the wrath of the dark and deadly storm that had passed, that we somehow for some reason had been punished. A cool, unfettered breeze brings comfort now in this dark sweltering world, remnants of the monster that had come banging on our weak and unprepared doors. A waning memory of the howling wind that would shake your very soul serves as the only reminder that taking anything for granted is the deadliest sin of all.

It was morning. Water flowed in canals we used to call streets. A melancholy hush swept across the stretch of town completely empty of traffic but boasting a rush of stragglers curious to see what the storm lay waste to. There is a constant industrial grinding of generators and other machinery in the distance cutting through an uneasy silence of a community sleeping through recovery, struggling slow attempts at picking up the pieces.

Ike is its name. Boasting power this city had not seen in a storm for quite some time, and undoubtedly weakening in its own path somewhere northeast of us, a widespread devastation left in its wake. The flicker of candlelight weakens as the moments pass, my ambitious writing growing faster and more frantically illegible on this scrabble scorecard, a remnant of one form of entertainment we needed to turn to in this ordeal and the faint aroma of grilled meat from our recent makeshift dinner hangs in the air. All constant reminders of our very limited resources, and our confused and fearful minds. How long can we keep this up? The bellows of faint traffic sound every now and then, the city’s failed attempts at achieving normalcy immediately after quite the apocalypse. We looked up at the grey cold sky that loomed above us, giving no trace of the danger that came before it. We looked up a lot. And for fun, just for fun, we then looked down. And saw them. The birds lined the streets. Broken wings. Broken necks. Everywhere. And then slowly…as time went on, as days went by and turn into weeks…the birds went back up into the sky. And I will always be sitting here, watching those birds in the sky, waiting for the next moment to happen.

I find myself at the mercy of a nightly bottle and a repeat run of the hit show The World’s Funniest Moments. Life is getting quieter again. Life is getting lonelier again. And I’m coming home much more exhausted, staying in the company of my work past lights out almost nightly. Miles between here and home are racking up as the days go by, and the happiness I find in typing jokes to my closest friends through online chat rooms during the workday is a good indicator that something vitally cathartic and necessarily visceral is rendering my life, at the moment, severely incomplete. I can only reflect on the words I read that won’t stop running through my mind, “Trust me homes… when we look back on how great this COULD have been, it will be on you,” and it is all I can do, NOT to ultimately believe them. So I’m sorry but sometimes, it is nice to forget about things, the same way they have forgotten about you. Even if you have to make it happen. Even if it means having to destroy your coffee table. I'll make a list of things to do. I'll make a list of things to be. I'll make a list of things never to look forward to again. And i will make a list of things I will wait til world's end to see one last time.

I’ve never been through an apocalypse before. I didn’t ask for a front row seat. All the same, I hear this whisper in the distance…of a bigger storm yet to come.

Current Songs: Dashboard Confessionals – Stolen, Saliva – Rest in Pieces

Earth-Shattering Revelation #23: It’s okay to feel like less than a part of your life sometimes. Or less than a part of others'. Even in the ones that are most important to you.

Two Epic Tales You Don't Need To Read

So tomorrow, i guess, the drama culminates, and hopefully concludes. Pretty much just a matter of accepting that things are changing possibly for the worse and possibly for good on that front, admittedly or not. Don't know what to do and don't know what I did, but everyone else seems really optimistic and excited about everything. And my head is just filled with a blur of thoughts. Didn't even get a phonecall. Going to miss my friend.

Today I walked over to the CVS for some lunch. They told me at the counter that I get a free toothbrush. I've been wanting to buy a toothbrush for quite sometime now. It is a shame when your toothbrush gets worn...and you just never get around to moving on from it. Lazy? No. Maybe. Regardless, CVS gave me a free one and it made my day. My week. I just thought that was nice.

Never Enough...

...Shade in the deepest reaches of a forest from the harsh, bright summer sun.
Thoughts and voices in your head to keep you from really listening.
Words to describe someone’s anguish, solace, misery or sorrow.
Time to sit, breath, listen, speak, wait, grow, learn, or become.
Plans to be made and broken, promises you forget to keep.
Truth in the world to mend the destruction of a single lie.
Change to make things really, truly or ultimately better.
Distance between people, truly destined to be together.
Jokes can be made to keep the laughter from stopping.
Reflection to make the mirror show you the true self.
People in the crowd to make the loneliness go away.
Breaths to catch when you’re calming the madness.
Hours in even the longest and most trying of days.
Justifications that prove it really isn’t your fault.
Prayers to keep your darkest demons at bay.
Voices to keep whispered secrets quiet.
Music heard beyond the noise of life.
Destinies driven by your memories.
Fear of the things you can’t help.
Shards of one’s broken heart.
To keep them from leaving.
Moments to really live.
Tears to wash away.
Stars in the sky.
Expectation.

To be truly sated with any of these things, is to know ancient truths about existence, to resolve the epic struggle between the heart and the mind. It’s not possible. And if it is, please tell me how. I would really like to know. If you got the time.

But in the meantime, I will keep following the fire in the sky…and THAT, my friends, will always have to be enough.

Anniversary

Let’s see. The complete degradation of my emotional drive. A re-evaluation of my character and spirit in context of losing sight of everything I held important and enlightening. Loss. Regret. Shame. Coming to terms with who I am without the context of close friends and family. Coming to terms with the realities of my decisions, realizing the consequences of them as they befall me. But finally getting my integrity back, having inadvertently grasped my destiny.

I was in awe one year ago stepping onto a new personal frontier, not aware of the darkness that was about to happen in the coming months. Initial pitfalls and an enexpected scramble for solid ground at the beginning colored an outlook I had to reshape about my life here in Houston. I buried myself in a depression that now realize spanned the good part of months of that year, with residual effects felt even now. Alas now I am just able to stand and finally start becoming the person I want to be, a year from when I felt on top of the world. Tough part of being on top like that is that it entails the hardest fall for those without a proper foothold. I guess when I hit bottom, I realized it was because I learned that I finally had to let go of a lot of … things.

This is an excerpt I came across in that time, given to me by one of my closest friends here, Andrea (thank you). It helped. Even for just a little bit. Even for just a little while. As did the rain. And some important phonecalls.

Being Twenty-Something

They call it the "Quarter-life Crisis." It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are many things about yourself that you didn't know and may not like. You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now. You start realizing that people are selfish and that, maybe, those friends that you thought you were so close to aren't exactly the greatest people you have ever met, and the people you have lost touch with are some of the most important ones. What you don't recognize is that they are realizing that too, and aren't really cold, catty, mean or insincere, but that they are as confused as you.

You look at your job...and it is not even close to what you thought you would be doing, or maybe you are looking for a job and realizing that you are going to have to start at the bottom and that scares you. Your opinions have gotten stronger. You see what others are doing and find yourself judging more than usual because suddenly you realize that you have certain boundaries in your life and are constantly adding things to your list of what is acceptable and what isn't. One minute, you are insecure and then the next, secure. You laugh and cry with the greatest force of your life. You feel alone and scared and confused. Suddenly, change is the enemy and you try and cling on to the past with dear life, but soon realize that the past is drifting further and further away, and there is nothing to do but stay where you are or move forward. You get your heart broken and wonder how someone you loved could do such damage to you. Or you lay in bed and wonder why you can't meet anyone decent enough that you want to get to know better.

Or maybe you love someone but love someone else too and cannot figure out why you are doing this because you know that you aren't a bad person. One night stands and random hook ups start to look cheap. Getting wasted and acting like an idiot starts to look pathetic. You go through the same emotions and questions over and over, and talk with your friends about the same topics because you cannot seem to make a decision. You worry about loans, money, the future and making a life for yourself.....and while winning the race would be great, right now you'd just like to be a contender!

What you may not realize is that everyone reading this relates to it. We are in our best of times and our worst of times, trying as hard as we can to figure this whole thing out.

I'm moving again. Tomorrow in fact. And i'm okay with it. I feel like this apartment knows more of my darkness than many people in my life. Its seen the worst of me. It's kept me company and consoled me. It shielded me from the storm. And i pay it gratitude by leaving it behind. But it and I are not bound, in fact, we realize that though this "place" was and will always be important to me, it is an important part of what once was, and it's now time from something new again. Something different. But something just as important. It is true about my first home here in Houston, and it is true about a lot of things in life.*

I’d like to dedicate this year to perhaps the one person (second to my family) that really, truly and unselfishly helped me in my first year here, from the moment I arrived. Unrelenting support and humor is what you get from friends like this…the closest of very few people who you hold in highest regard, whose friendships you fiercely guard and defend, because you realize that the importance of that friendship is the thread that holds you hanging above life’s thorns. He helped me realize realities that would have come harder and tougher to bounce back from later on, made me acknowledge, without destroying my spirit, the consequences of the impulse of decisions, and the inevitable disappointment you find in the most unlikely of situations. He told me he was proud of me, and that I inspired him. He forced me to, despite the challenges that lay ahead and the emotional wounds of departure from State College and arrival in Houston, get up and begin the life I was so desperate to find here for a reason he never had to ask for. He knew I wasn’t doing well, and without asking or having me explain anything, he always just knew what to say, how to say it, or when not to say anything at all. He helped me realize things about the nature of people in my life. Taught me to let go. He assured me that those at home who were still important still supported me. His words rung with clarity in a time when my head was filled with discord and utter dread. He shortened the miles between here and home. And he promised, when he left, that I would never be forgotten…a promise I needed so desperately at that time, when the safety of a promise lay broken beyond repair.

And unlike many people in my life, he kept that promise.

Thank you, Paul, for making my anniversary a pleasant one.