When I was seven, I told my mother that I had been abducted by aliens, fed the stars, and now the universe was inside my stomach. She, in her primitive state of disbelief, waved me away and set in motion a dark plan to prepare me for my future. Even without anyone else's acknowledgement of my feeble existence, I started each day remembering that I had swallowed the universe and all the beauty in the world was residing in me. I moved through my affairs with a promise that was unwavering. I lived in a world all my own until I realized that what goes into a body eventually comes out, so I waited patiently every day to see if the universe had released itself from my bowls, not understanding that it had been long gone. The beauty that I held onto so tightly for so long had exploded out of me leaving only its mark, a long path and freshly calloused feet.
As the years went on, I forgot about that adventure. I forgot that the universe was a product of my own series of unfortunate events and the stars tasted as sweet as honey. For me, the days became ritual, the hours planned down to the minute. There was no room for spontaneity on the route to success, and I would be successful. I fell in line with the rest of the pack. So, I followed where the alpha led, claimed my number under the endless sea of people, and moved until I couldn’t even distinguish myself amongst the wandering lost faces. Still I moved, never questioning where or why but somehow embracing my lost spirit with the full understanding that we would all figure it out together. I believed I wasn’t lost. Instead, I thought I was on the right path, the reasonable path. Many more have taken this route, and they all have come to some end. All I needed to do was continue to see the path in front of me, follow the dotted line with my head down constantly searching for it.
There are some times in life when it becomes apparent that no matter how many waterproof layers you have on, rain will still seep through all of them and soak you. Sometimes you’re in a storm for an hour, or a day, two weeks, nine months, five years, eighteen years, and sometimes life isn’t so cruel and you’re struck by lightning and the uncomfortable is over quick. When my head finally rises to stop staring at the path carved into the dirt by heavy feet, I look into the night, always night, hoping my own weary feet would stop. To stop, would mean to be trampled. We all push forward. When the rain does come, I look for myself in the droplets and only see a disfigured animal unkempt, dark, and sniveling. It’s shape bearing no resemblance to what I know of myself, so I run forward frightened by the knowledge that this beast will swallow me. We’re all chased by our shadows and each other’s shadows to climb further, jump higher, and run faster. It’s a miracle that we can continue under so much strain. As weary as we are, we don’t stop. Ever.
Yesterday, I saw a body fall. It just gave up, fell over, and many people placed their feet upon the sack in a ritualistic rhythm that sickened me. It’s true, this wasn’t the first person I had seen give up. Greater men have tried and failed. Sometimes the body just can’t do what the mind wills it to do, so it must stop and move on to the great beyond. This sickened me because for the first time, I saw another face and not just a lifeless form. One, among the endless sea, had shown themselves to me, and together we moved on the same frequency. Our feet tapped and tapped together, and it seemed as if we figured out communication. When that body fell, I did not stop to pick it up because to do so would be to force something to move beyond its allotted time. I slowed but didn’t stop. I moved in fear that I would be next. I drifted between sanity and insanity on how I could move forward and continue to pick up each foot knowing how I participated in the ritual degradation of what some would call a friend.
I just can’t do it anymore. I’m not happy, and I haven’t been for a while. I don’t fancy dirt paths or endless wandering. I think I’ve known that all along. I’m just not cut out for this miserable lifestyle. I can’t live a scheduled existence. It’s crueler to be forced along with unrealistic expectations than to face reality. I will never rise out of this place. I have no power over myself. What have I been wondering for? This is a sick allusion, a tragic play, and I’m not even playing the leading role. I know you don’t understand because I don’t fully understand, but it’s time. It’s time to live untethered, unbound, to be truly fearless. The world constrains me and seduces me, so I must go. I must answer its loud and gritty call to the end. That’s the only way to stop the rat race. I’m done considering reason. This is my end. This is rock bottom … but who do I talk to about this? Does anyone know the answers or have an alternative to what I’m planning? Can I trust myself to go through with it? No. That’s why I’ve never been good at individual sports. I don’t have enough self-motivation to push myself, to pursue myself. It is, I suppose, how I ended up with this motley crew, writhing in the trenches. I haven’t exactly gone off the deep end and hit rock bottom, although I imagine there’s a special cliff assigned to everyone and you jump off of a diving board. I say exactly because I can see the cliff and I’m sprinting toward it. Some days are just like that. You see the cliff, you jump. If I’m being honest, there are a few people behind me who wouldn’t mind jumping if I jumped.
I am completely and utterly lost. One day, in the midst of my wondering, I looked up into the night just long enough to walk away from the path. I was following the stars. Somewhere in the glimmer of the North Star I saw what I imagined to be Hope. She was pulling a cart of tacos and cotton candy, flavors I forgot existed. I wanted to taste, I wanted to feel. I wanted so badly for this encounter to be real that I wandered off the path, and I ended up left to my own devices. In that moment, I thought I could change everything, do great things, as I was so often told to do. Did I also mention hope was wearing a cape or maybe wings and she shimmered like a fairy freshly dipped in magic? I thought she would give me all the answers, or at least enough answers to make it through the next week or month without feeling lost. My hope was so strong that I drifted to take the path less traveled alone. She smiled on me, so I traveled on with newly developed plans and ideas. I had Hope and just enough drive and courage follow.
I’ve learned to stop asking if things can get worse. I don’t ask if the waves will stop crashing on the back of my heels like hot lava or screen doors because if I sit long enough, if I wait an extra second to move, it usually does. That’s life. To be in it, is to accept the inevitable. Shit happens all over you. There’s no way to get around it. We are in an unavoidable cycle that requires us to shift amongst the phases of life with as much or as little civility as we want. For me, it seems as if my whole time would be spent in the immense valley, and my own happiness would level out on tiny hills useable to the human eye. I guess someone has to be this person, or we wouldn’t evolve. Someone must be down. This time it was my turn. I would bite the bullet with dignity and grace. No matter how many times I find my body ravaged or my feet back in the trenches there will be dignity and grace.
This week I’m in a better headspace. It was stupid and unreasonable to be led by lost pilgrims who forgot why they even started this journey. Maybe, in their own eyes, they weren't lost. Maybe they had the best intentions in mind just like I did, but the reality of my situation was I didn’t belong there. I didn’t belong to those people. For the longest, I thought my responsibility was to them. I carried them with me daily, though I never knew them. While I was allowing myself to be consumed by the constant drudgery and mundane activities I prescribed myself to, I assume I missed my window of opportunity, or I got so fond of that delightful path that I no longer wished to escape it. I’d like to think I came into that space a bright shining coin, and after more than a few goes through the vending machine I was spit out, unpassable and unrecognizable to the system. Once I followed hope, I wasn’t given direction or a road map to follow, but following those stars lit a new fire in me. Now I ran faster, jumped higher. I crossed more ground than ever before, and this time I didn’t even mind that I was going in circles.
When I notice the ugly disheveled monster has returned, I just remember I’ve had better days. This is the reason we have soap and deodorant. It’s the only way I know how to stop myself from running from my own shadow. After that, I begin to figure out how to patch that hole in my layers with something a little better than duct tape. Temporary fixes lead to long term problems, and long term problems don’t get solved until you die. What people don’t realize is that those problems don’t die, they just get projected onto the next sucker stupid enough to be near you because demons don’t die they’re inter-generational. My issue is that I always tend to be standing next to myself, around myself, inside myself, outside of myself. No matter where I allow my mind to wander, I am always attached to myself. When I sit and think, maybe this isn’t my life and what I see is only what I imagine, I try to imagine a better life for myself and feel if that one is right. Usually it isn’t, and I must accept that what I am or rather who I am is me. Everything I hate or love, every experience and mistake is all me. None of this life is a cloud or dream, just me.
On the day the stars reintroduced me to the sun it was a beautiful day. One of those days where the sky was a bright blue, cheery against the soft white pillowy clouds. A kind of day that would make thirty thousand feet feel like an arm’s length away. I was drowning. No, I was drunk off the endlessness of the blue. It went on and on, past the rooftops, over the hills stretching far into the distance beckoning me to follow the path it laid out. The magnificence of it was breathtaking and nauseating. It commanded me to move quickly because the path would only be there so long. I found myself taking short panicked breaths all of a sudden overwhelmed with life slammed between a moment of bliss and the more present future. Do I follow the sun, the clouds, the endless sky, or do I follow my conscious? It’s completely irresponsible to make such a decision. I don’t know where I’m going or what jagged paths I’ll come across. This seems more like a call to death than the light and happy child’s play that the clouds suggested. To veer in any directions is to be lost indefinitely. Besides, I had already played this game with hope, and I ended up lost more years than I cared to count. Although, even when I was lost, I found more freedom wandering through the darkness than ever before. I ran towards the sun leaving my middle finger as a good bye to the night.
The most ironic thing about day, is it’s always followed by night. How I never noticed is a mystery to me, yet years of following the dirt trail etched into the ground could be the explanation for my ignorance. After all that time, it would seem as if my own vision etched the path into the ground, not the tattered souls of many. How on earth could this be normal? Must I stay on this roller coaster? When does all of this end? In my gut, I knew this was normal. The question I really should have asked was when am I able to fully stop being haunted by night and get the opportunity to be caressed in light’s warm embrace? The fact is, the two are opposite forces, clamoring for my attention and activity. You can’t just have one or the other. You live normally with both, constantly aware of your shortcoming. You fight to make yourself believe that no matter how long you stare at the path there is a row of lilies encompassing it, creating your own normal. I decided to move in willful ignorance and childlike wonder rather than to drudge about the world under a dark cloud in a primitive state of disbelief. I decided to no longer be cruel to myself. In following the stars and the clouds I freed myself from monotony, drudgery, self-loathing, from myself. It was time to finally, finally live.
Today, I fell. What I realized, as I stumbled, flailing on the way down, was that I wasn’t giving up. I was done. All I needed to do was prove to myself that life was worth living. In my last moments, I lived fully aware of death, her tragedy, her loving forgiveness. This was something that I didn’t recognize until the end, just as I didn’t recognize the look of contentment on the bodies that fell before mine. It was peace that told the legs to stop, not the idea of giving up. I didn’t need to live in preparation for death, but I had to learn to live with death, with misery, and with hope. My mind was finally accepting what my body had screamed for years. It didn’t matter that I was consumed by infinite chasms. I learned to accept the short stick fate handed me, and live purely in every minute, feeling wholeheartedly the days when it was no effort to pick my head up and stare boldly into the sunlight. However ignorant that may seem, it was my choice to live because life isn’t about happiness, it’s about survival. That’s why I was joyful when those days came, when hope stole me away in her taco cart, when the stars granted me the privilege of a small light in the darkness. In its organic state a minute of happiness can sustain far longer than years of pain. What I’ve learned is that sometimes, if you let it, the universe will reveal itself to you. The infinite spaces we inhabit will smile upon you and bee stings will seem like sweet kisses. If you let it, the world will unveil itself, and you will run through it on a fresh patch of soft grass, a creator of your own path, into the sunlight.