What if She Were Our Daughter?

i’ll put a record on
to remind myself
as the tempo turns
into a machine that
transcends time
funneling memories
through my ears
and through my tears

stepping into your bedroom
again to find you wrapped
in your sheets and tangled
up in your innocence
falling away from the world

your bed is an island
us holding close and clasping
for hope of a spark
to set us on fire
fumbling to find
each other in the fog
of awkward adolescence

although time has tapered
off my temptation for you
and distance has erased
the eloquence of our existence
there is still a thread
of reasoning that penetrates
this particular pattern

now you’ve found the fire
in someone else
and sparked a life
of your very own
but the memories
of moist lips
remain in the music

Walk Away the Day

Before I left for college, I spent the entire summer walking daily. I purchased a pedometer and a new pair of walking shoes and hit the road, specifically the dirt road across from my house. In the beginning, my dog, Sam, walked with me but after a few incidents of car chasing and almost being run over, my parents had to bribe him with treats to get him to stay at the house while I snuck out the back so he wouldn’t see me and tag along. It was hard at first, battling the uneven dirt/gravel combo and the heat of the sun, not to mention how horribly out of shape I was. I only lasted a little while at first but as the days went on, I pushed through the pain in my legs and the sweat in my eyes and kept going, eventually making it up to four miles a day.

I did this all summer and entered college the slimmest I had been since I was a little kid. Naturally, that didn’t last long. I was a victim of the freshman fifteen, although it was more like the freshman thirty. I’ve been struggling to get back down to that weight ever since. During every break from school, I made weak promises to myself to eat better and get back on that dirt road. And I would. For the first few days. Then I’d succumb to my mother’s southern cooking and eventual lethargy. It always felt nice to get back out there. It reminded me of the days before everything went to hell. Yet, I just wasn’t into it anymore. Perhaps the dread of knowing where I’d be headed in the next few weeks deflated the fun of walking. Maybe I just wanted to be lazy so I could work up enough stamina to endure the quarter ahead. Thinking about it now, I wish I would have taken the time to walk every chance I got so I could have cleared my head of all the caustic clutter that only piled up as each year progressed. Maybe if I would have walked more I wouldn’t have ended up with this huge mess that I have to deal with now.

As much as I hate to admit this, I think it’s true: exercise relieves stress. Maybe the exercise itself doesn’t relieve stress but provides the opportunity for me to relieve the stress on my own. And that opportunity is writing, of course. It’s just amazing how my head opens up in the dirt. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’m not distracted by television or the internet. Without all these shows to watch and websites to visit and all the other technological interruptions that keep me from deep thinking, I’ve really been able to focus on all the foul things that float around in my noggin. (Even as I’m writing this, I’m watching television and listening to music and can’t seem to get this written as well as I want it to be.) But when my feet are sinking into the sand and I’m waving at the cows as I pass by, my head is clear and I’m able to get deep inside my brain and nail down my otherwise elusive demons. I feel like walking is the only time I can find some semblance of privacy, a location where my stress pours out like sweat and an energy that’s conducive for contemplation.

Now that I have nothing ahead of me, I can fully focus on walking again. And I have. In fact, I’ve been walking consistently for the past two weeks. I’ve only missed maybe a day or two and that’s been a conscious decision to do so. I don’t wanna start off strong and then get burned out on walking so I decided to take a day to relax and not walk so as to give my legs a bit of a break. The weird part is I really enjoy getting out there. Everything that was good about it the first time is good again. I find myself looking forward to my walks. Could it be? Could I really be looking forward to exercising? And I think that’s the thing about this walking. It’s not just exercise to me. I don’t even see it as exercise. It’s so much more. Of course, the initial intention was to lose weight but it became more about me losing my lunacy. I actually crave getting out there and getting my shirt soaked in sweat. There was one day that I didn’t want to go ‘cause I didn’t feel like it but I just kept telling myself I needed to get out there, that I would regret it if I didn’t. And so I walked and I felt much better afterward.

I walk daily now and intend to make that a healthy habit. I hope it will help my body and my brain. And what I enjoy most of all is the fact that I finally have something to look forward to each day. With no school, no job and no friends to keep me entertained, I mostly sit around and watch television until it gets cool enough outside to walk. It’s sad but this has become my life and I don’t hate it ‘cause I really see this being beneficial to me. It gets me active and provides an opportunity to organize my thoughts. My only fear is that missing one day will lead to me missing two and then three and then I’ll stop walking entirely. I have a habit of going full on with everything I do. I either wanna do something all the way or not at all. That’s why I have to make those conscious decisions not to walk instead of giving into laziness. And this is why I need to keep pushing myself to get out there as much as possible, to purge the pudge and, in the process, find a little sanity in the sand.

Remove Your Heart Upon Entering

as if to drain marrow from the bone
i’m separating event and emotion
tampering this seal that pressed
between our parts and paths
careening into uncrossed waters
penetrating, desecrating, coagulating

staying up late in lieu of lying down
learning how to trace the tip of your tongue
with the pale expanse of my temples
coming together in undulating understanding
knowing that this only leads to a cliff
but I wouldn’t have it any other way

nerves negating anything more than skin
only seizing and erupting in empty euphoria
creating concrete connections that are brittle
cracking until it bleeds, as cold as i like it
pressing hard until the moisture rushes in
but we’re only swapping sympathies

Written Resuscitation

I walked along the cobblestone streets and rode the sleek elevators. I felt the sunshine on my back and the air conditioner on my face. I jogged to the park and drove to the movies. I constantly balanced on a fine line between new and old, here and there, me and them. I wandered around in search of something. I was looking for answers but I wasn’t even sure what the questions were. I was completely lost. And this scavenger hunt for questions and answers brought about more questions. How could I let myself get so distracted? How did I let myself get so bogged down in whatever had pulled me into this despair? What was the point when I became separated from my identity, my passion, my spark? When did it all come crashing down and where was I when it happened? Didn’t I see it coming? Was it like a wall coming down or did it hit me brick by brick?

These answers can only come from within. It’s going to take me shutting myself down and looking inward, navigating the labyrinth of loneliness that has become my chest, the maze of madness that has become my head and the long stretch of empty street that has become my soul. I have a lot of contemplation to consider and there’s a part of me that doesn’t even want to go there. I know the journey is going to be exhausting, sorting through the mess that is my mind until I find some clarity. I don’t even know if all the answers are there. Is what’s wrong with us stuck somewhere inside of our guts? Is it accessible as long as we think long enough, hard enough, or are we doomed to despair until someone tells us what’s wrong with us and then hands us a bottle of pills? Can we trust God to slowly sort things out or is it going to take an external influence? I just don’t know and so I’ll continue doing the one thing that ever brought about moderate relief to me: write.

When I was alive, I wrote a lot. I started doing it for fun but ended up finding it quite therapeutic. I think humans have a natural tendency to express themselves. We all have this burning inside of us, this innate urge to purge our thoughts and feelings. That’s why there’s art and music and the written word. And I was no different. I needed to express myself, too. The only problem was I had no one to turn to when I felt like unloading my feelings. My friends only wanted to unload on me, my mom told me to get over it, my dad wasn’t emotionally available and my dog was a great listener but he never had any advice to give. So, over the years all of my thoughts and feeling and emotions, whether they were good or bad, stayed inside of me. I had no where to place them, no one to present them to so they burrowed themselves inside my guts and began to fester. I started becoming emotionally distant because I was forced to. No one wanted to listen and so my voice grew pale.

Drawing was my first form of therapy. Sitting on the brown carpet with Crayolas in hand distracted me from the sadness. Coloring books and sketchpads offered a small reprieve from the pain inside but it wasn’t as long lasting as I found writing to be. No, writing made me feel different inside every time I would express something that had been stuck in me for so long. It felt like I had removed a small splinter, like the heavy thing that had laid claim to my cranium had gotten somewhat lighter. Writing rarely solved my problems but problems always manifest themselves in two ways: The actual problem and the stressful feeling that accompanies said problem. For me, writing resolved the stress part. And although it didn’t magically make everything better, it did help and at the time I discovered writing, I needed all the help I could get.

And this is why I write now. It’s my therapy. It’s the way I deconstruct my thoughts and re-examine my troubles. If I can articulate myself well enough, I can find a solution. If I can’t, at least I’ve gotten rid of the stress part. I’ve even managed to turn a great deal of my pain into poetry, taking back the control it had over me and turning it into something a little less ugly. Writing is the glue that holds my head together. Writing is one of the only things that feels good to me anymore…mostly. It feels good when I can write something beautiful or when I can organize my thoughts. But, when I have writer’s block or if my mind is too distracted, that’s when writing becomes the most frustrating part of my existence. It's like I have this problem and yet I can’t get rid of it by my usual method so the only choice I have is to let it gnaw at me until I’m numb. And I find myself once again teetering along that fine line between opposites, discovering myself torn between two realms with writing being either my deliverance or my damnation.

Maybe I didn’t write enough, maybe I didn’t examine things as thoroughly as I should have because while writing might have kept me sane, it didn’t keep me alive. Maybe I just discovered it too late, maybe I was too far gone, too far damaged to be kept healthy. Not only did I find myself pondering the past but I also had a present to deal with and a future that frightened me. And all of that, past, present, future, myself, other people, the entire world, heaven, hell and everything in between all found itself crammed into my tiny little head and all I had was a notebook and a pencil and I don’t think all the writing in the world could have evicted all my vices. But, writing is all I have left so I won’t give up on it just yet. What it couldn’t help me with in life I hope it can in death.

Writing forces me to examine whatever happens to me on my mind. This examination leads to organization, which, in turn, leads to revelations that bring about salvation…or maybe in my case, a resuscitation.

The Aftermath

I always got along with everyone but never fit in with anyone. In high school, I was the floater. I’d drift from friend to friend and from one circle to another and it was nice having such a diverse group of people around me but I still felt like I was lacking something. Unfortunately, I so desperately wanted to connect with a clique. Mind you, I never wanted to be anyone’s exclusively but there’s a certain kind of comfort knowing that you belong somewhere. I never belonged to a certain group. I had no specific place to call my own. Consequently, I felt pretty empty most of the time. I never had a best friend in high school, no single person I could always count on or call up and talk to about anything. I was awkward and quiet around some people and loud and silly around others. It always seemed like someone brought out a different something in me but no one ever let me be everything I was. I didn’t have anyone I could share my thoughts on love with one minute and tell a fart joke the next. I was torn between all of these different personalities and I was never able to pull them all together into one cohesive person. It didn’t help matters that I was completely fake in high school. Naturally, I wanted to be among the popular group, to feel that unity, to be loved and envied. And so I tried to do things that I thought would make me popular, such as dressing a certain way or listening to a certain kind of music. This desperate attempt at acceptance only led to more of an identity crisis. I lost myself somewhere in high school. And most unfortunate of all was the fact that no one shared my mind. No one in my grade was artistic like I was except for one guy but he was a major tool and I didn’t want any part of him. No one else equaled my passion for drawing, my love of animation. I had no one to share that part of myself with and I was very alone.

I endured two years of community college, which just felt like a Twilight Zoned version of high school with same drama, same pettiness, only more faces to add to the façade. I found some promise in my art classes. Because this was college, the kids that were in my class wanted to be there, for the most part. I met some interesting people and even made friends with a girl who dreamed of one day owning her own clothing boutique. She had the cutest speech impediment and she was pretty and she actually seemed interested in befriending me.

I thought, “Oh, if only SCAB were filled with these kind of people, I’ll absolutely love it there and I might even meet a girl like this who’d be interested in being more than just a friend.”

It was a dream of mine to go to that school, a rather blind dream now that I look back on it. I only looked at one other college while applying to SCAB. It’s just that I was told throughout middle and high school that SCAB was the place to go so I never bothered to look anywhere else. I took their word that I would get a great education there and make all of my artistic dreams come true. And as I got older, I hoped my dreams for a vibrant social life would also materialize. I had a lot of hopes and dreams for that school. I just knew things would be different, that not only would I be given a platform for my art to shine but I’d also meet like-minded people, people that were as passionate as I was, talented students that would enlighten and challenge me. I had wished so much that at last I wouldn’t ever be alone.

My first dream came true when I was accepted. I only later learned that at the time I applied, they pretty much accepted anyone. So any validation I got that I was a genuinely good artist was thrown out the window. I did receive a scholarship, though, so that fact only offered temporary satisfaction. I already had a healthy dose of low self-esteem before going to SCAB but it was only made worse when classes started. I was surrounded by phenomenal talent. It took me off guard and I had to realize I wasn’t in Alabama anymore. I had taken for granted that I was the best artist in high school. That’s not me bragging. It’s just fact but it’s not so much a fact to brag about because no one else was interested in art. I was the best one because I was the only one. But I was no longer the only one. I was one among many and I no longer stood out. Of course there were kids in class who were just phoning it in, just like any other school, but the difference between them was they sucked because they didn’t care while I sucked even though I tried. Although I felt lost in high school, felt like an unknown and unacknowledged outcast, I was at least known for my art. It was the only thing I had to cling on to and now I didn’t even have that anymore. I was hoping to find myself in college but I only felt more lost than ever. Any kind of identity I had, however small it may have been, was slowly stripped away from me.

And that dream I had about the school and being accepted also began to wilt. I realized the school was quite different than the picture it painted on the pretty brochures and fancy statistics. It wasn’t as high profile and glamorous as it portrayed itself. Many of the professors were failed animators. Many of them were bitter or didn’t know the first thing about teaching. They were hired to make the school look better, to boast names that all too briefly dipped their toes in the industry. The professors were impatient and unprofessional. The equipment, while state of the art, crashed frequently. After leaving a class, I never felt fully satisfied. There was always something missing, something lacking in their instructions, something about their careless nature that turned me off over and over again.

Slowly the veil dropped from around that place and I saw it for what it really was: a money sucking machine. They had my money and were slowly taking my soul and that’s all they cared about. They left me on the floor to flounder and I don’t think I ever fully recovered from the shock. What little talent I had began to shrivel, taking a backseat to my ever growing disappointment and neurosis. It seems perfectly normal now that no college is as great as it seems. I suppose it’s strange that I’m just now realizing how it all works, how I suppose I shouldn’t be so trusting of boastful advertising. Yet, back then I was so blinded by hope, so young and naïve that I never questioned the school’s authenticity. That was a lesson learned.

I was suffering academically, becoming consumed by my own insecurity, becoming overwhelmed and eventually shut out by the many talented students in the class, reducing my face to that of just another mediocre student that never stood out in any way. I shuffled along, never finding acknowledgment, never receiving recognition. I hardly missed a day of class, did all of my assignments on time and to the best of my ability (based on the fluidity of my mental capacities at the time) and was quickly forgotten in return. And things were no better socially.

I recalled all the friends I’d make, how I’d find a photographer friend that would take great pictures of me and make me feel handsome, boost my self-esteem and make me feel better about myself. I’d make friends with a musician and he/she would teach me how to play the guitar so I could express my thoughts through song. I’d hook up with a fashion major and she’d dress me and hold me and teach me about love. I’d meet people of different religions and ethnicities and soak all of their differences up like a sponge and become more cultured and more understanding of others. And most importantly, each one of these people would have a piece of me within themselves, that same fire and energy and passion for art and beauty and poetry and life. These would be the people who would understand and encourage. They would get me. I would finally find my lunch table group. I’d finally have someone to cover all aspects of life with. I’d finally belong.

It just didn’t happen like that. I in fact did make friends with a photographer but she never took pictures of me. I’d ask but she would never agree to it. I guess I'm not photogenic. I in fact did go on a date with a fashion major but after one date and a half dates and a boring viewing of Garden State in her dorm room, she found interest in another guy. Typical. I in fact did come in contact with a musician. He was my first roommate but he never taught me how to play the guitar. He only drove me crazy and forced me to question everything I ever believed in. He was mean spirited and jaded and he made it his personal agenda to bring me down into the abyss that he inhabited. He hurt me the most for so many reasons. He was older than me and had already attended the school for a year before I came along. I had so hoped he would show me around and take me under his wing. I looked up to him and respected him for being a musician (because to me there is no one more respectable in my mind than a musician) and I found his behavior intriguing at first because he was so different than me. I projected a big brother persona onto him, a persona he systematically destroyed every day. I quickly came to find out he had no interest in helping me out but he did enjoy hurting me whenever he could. He was never physically violent but put enough hate into my head to mess me up for a long time.

I never made any real friends during my three years in school. My first roommate was a total jerk and his friends were also unsavory. The people I’d talk to in class would be friendly during the course but after it was over I never heard from them again. The only constant in my life was the photographer but she was messed up, too. In fact, I think that’s why we got along so well and argued so often. We were both total nut bags but she also happened to be an unreliable nut bag. She couldn’t ever be there for me because she had her own life to mess up. My roommates were better my second and third year but it was just a case of four vastly different guys being placed together and making the best of it. While they were all nice, none of them came through as a good friend. We had nothing in common and all had different values and belief systems. And I tried, oh how I tried, to make it work with them but they had their own things going on.

Slowly but surely, everything that had made me happy to leave home and go to school was now making me want to leave school and jump off a cliff. Nothing was happening how I had hoped and all of my visions of a happy life were breaking up everywhere I turned. To make things more frustrating, I had no one to turn to during this time. And as my dream of making genuine friends and going to a genuinely great school slowly died, so did my passion, my energy and my motivation. I began to question my talents and realized I wasn’t as good as most of the students and I wasn’t grasping new concepts like the others were. Things didn’t come easily to me and I had to work twice as hard to produce work half as good. I realized I was no good at animation, barely any good at just drawing. I just wasn’t skilled enough. I was lacking talent and patience. There was something inside of me that just wasn’t working like it should. That something inside of me messed up any chance at friendships, any chance at talent, and any chance at happiness.

And now I’m back home and my mind spins at the thought of school. I’m torn right down the middle because in some ways I feel like nothing has changed since high school. I’m still the fat guy with no friends and a mountain of insecurity. I’m stuck in a home with parents who don’t understand and "friends" that don’t care. But in some ways I feel a lot has changed, mostly within myself. And it’s not good. I’m still the same kid from high school but there are some parts missing. I’m no longer hopeful about anything. I don’t have high expectations for anything or anyone because I know expectation leads to disappointment. I look at people differently, not as generally kind but as mostly selfish. And I include myself in that category. I used to be so compassionate, so helpful to others. I used to care about people. I used to believe in people. And now all I do is wait around for others to let me down because I know they eventually will. And maybe I’m just projecting again, like I did with my roommate. Except this time I’m projecting my own internal character, that of someone who is bitter and hollow inside.

It’s hard to articulate just how much I put my hopes into that school, how I was so completely convinced that things would be better and how utterly disappointed I was when everything came crashing down. I hate that I had such a bad experience and I hate myself for ever being so naïve. I was way too deeply invested in nothing more than a hope, a thin concept with no guarantees for fulfillment and yet I took that chance and was the unlucky recipient of a huge slap in the face by the hand of the universe. And I wonder if that slap jarred me into regret or reality. Am I just now seeing things the way they are or am I viewing the world through blood spattered glasses? I don’t know if anyone will understand. Most will probably think I’m simply overreacting and maybe I am. Maybe a part of my problem is how overworked I get over insignificant situations but the fact of the matter is that I was uprooted from the only home I had ever known with no friends or family to help me out and I had to endure pissy professors and Mephistopheles as a roommate. All the while my vision of a beautiful college experience was collapsing so yeah, maybe all of my emotions were heightened, stretched beyond withstanding and eventually snapped under the strain. And I suppose I can’t expect anyone else to understand when I barely understand how I felt the way I did.

I left school with nothing tangible to take home and now, here I sit, snipping all strings of attachments I had to the place and the people that I encountered along the way. Not much has changed in the five or so years since I had those first few beautiful thoughts of a better life. I’m still fat and fragile. And while in school, I didn’t blossom, only withered. I didn’t find friends, only frustration. I didn’t discover love, only lamentation. I didn’t produce talent, only tears. I didn’t experience happiness, only heartache. Everything I ever believed in was chipped away. I was placed in a machine that sucked out my heart and soul, whisked away my wallet and then threw me out, dropped me off here to recover, to try and reconcile the past three years, to pick up the shattered pieces and try to find some semblance of understanding or closure and I just don’t know how I can do that. I don’t know how I can be capable of closure when there are still so many unanswered questions, so much pain and frustration and so much to figure out. For whatever reason, these past three years that were supposed to be the best of my life were in face the worst. I’m just not sure how I can recover from that, from all the wasted time and missed opportunities. I just don’t know how I can heal.

Adventures in Atrophy

There’s probably something you should know about me. It has come to my attention that over the past three years, I died at some point. Apparently, it happened without my knowledge, like some freak accident I didn’t see coming or passing away in my sleep. I suppose it makes sense the way certain situations have pushed me forward throughout these years, how life never bothered to wait for me to catch up and never allowed time for me to figure out I had expired, how it never informed me I wasn’t even a part of this mortal coil, only coiled up in my own cacophony. It has been said the time it takes for a person to figure out they have died is solely dependent on them, based on many factors within themselves, including how attached they were to the world and their own bodies. I think of how obsessed I am with my body, how materialistic I’ve become and it all makes perfect sense. No wonder I never realized I had died. I am still very much sutchured to myself and my mind.

It all came to me after I returned home. Without the weight of school surrounding my shoulders, I was able to find some stability, some sense of rest. And within that rest, the realization of my rigor mortis took place. I realized how sad I still was, how uninterested I was in friends and family, how I’d rather just stay in my room and fall asleep to the soothing sounds of cheap infomercials. As the light from the television pirouetted across my veiled pupils, I understood I was dead. I really thought things would change. I thought things would get better once I left school but I also thought that when I left home. I realize nothing has changed. Nothing has gotten better. If anything, I’ve only begun to rot.

These past three years have emptied me of all emotion. It’s taken away my blood and spine and interest in things I once loved. My heart has been hollowed out and I suspect it was done ventricle by ventricle, valve by valve, one piece at a time until it was nothing more than a shell. And maybe that’s why I never noticed my life slipping from me. It happened so gradually, so subtly. And I was too distracted to notice my shallow breaths, the headaches that I dismissed as stress that was really a lack of oxygen to my head. I died by inches and was too numb to notice.

Now I have two tasks ahead of me: I’ve got to figure out how to pass over and in the meantime, I’ve got to “live” life as a member of the walking dead. I have to coexist with these meat people. I have to hide my withering flesh and put on heirs, pretend to feel and laugh so no one detects my deterioration. And that’s why I’ve chosen to write about my life and death and the place in between that I find myself now. Maybe if I can make sense of what happened, maybe if I can understand myself a bit more, I’ll become less attached, more able to let go of the dream I had for myself. If I can accept that this life is over, if I can come to terms with my turgid body, if I can mend my mind then just maybe I’ll be able to pass over peacefully.

It’s all about unfinished business. It’s all about tying up loose ends. And in my life, I cut out a lot of people, leaving open wounds and seething scabs. And I’ve been cut up a bit myself. By examining these events, hopefully I can understand everyone’s actions. Examination leads to understanding and I can’t move on unless I understand why I’ve been hurt so much, why life took such a drastic turn in the wrong direction and how I let it all happen. I don’t feel anything anymore so I’m not scared to go back to those dark places, to reawaken old memories that have lied dormant in my chest. When it comes to slicing into old scars, I am fearless.

I'm also bitter. I am not bitter that I am dead. I am fine with that. I am bitter at life and I’m bitter at myself for not living the way I should have lived. And maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to cross over. My bitterness has formed an anchor that has weighed me down and kept me from ascending. I have to let it all go.

And that’s why I’m writing about all of this. I’m ready to move on. I’m ready to let all of this go. I am dead but I can still feel pangs of residual remorse over my life. I’m ready to find some understanding. I feel I am in a good position to do so. Now that I’m in a state of undeath, I am on the outside looking in. Things seem so much clearer from this angle of atrophy. And I hope by writing about life and death, I’ll open up the minds of others, offering a different way of looking at things. Through my “no pulse” perspectives, I hope that others can find the understanding they are looking for.

Instead of just rotting, I'll write and I'll write for as long as my carpals are capable. And maybe I've been granted a reprieve from the reaper for a reason. Maybe instead of me understanding that I died, maybe I'm supposed to understand that I lived, that my life wasn't as pointless as I thought it was. We're all supposed to have a purpose but I guess I never found mine. Or if I did, I didn't recognize it. Or maybe my purpose wasn't designated to life but to death. Maybe that's why I'm still here despite decomposition.

I'm going to put together my life and death in words. I'm going to craft my existence through poetry and the things I ponder. Along the way, I'm going to post old writings that I still believe to be true, some of my favorite reflections on life, love and humanity...or what's left of it. Come along for the ride as I chronicle my adventures in atrophy.