Bargaining

“But with demons sitting at my side,
An angel's come to ask me why
And slowly I give up inside to say
To feel alive, I'd give it all away…”
-Ben Jelen

Happiness is like an ever-dissolving diamond. When we are young, we find it solid and perfect. We run our palms over the smoothness and twirl it in our fingers to see how it catches the light. The sad fact is we’ll inevitably handle it too much until we’ve ground it down into dust.  We'll watch, helplessly, as the particles fall to the dirt where we sit. From there, we spend our whole lives trying to gather up the grains to reform that perfect pearl again.  We sift through the dirt and gunk and pack the remnants together to reformulate the rhinestone.  We use spit, glue, even hope as an adhesive to try to keep everything together.  Unfortunately, once the bauble has been broken down, it can never be built back up. We come close but it’s never the same, only a trinket tainted with the inextricable impurities from the ground. Hope can only hold it up so long until it falls away again and again and again. Yet, we keep trying in vain, keep compromising with the crystal but once it has deteriorated, sadness rushes in like a stream of water to fill its place, making our fingers slick and slippery until we can no longer grasp the glass.  We sit, surrounded by the shards of happiness that can no longer be solidified.

What else can you do when you die but ask, “And now what?”

That’s what I was wondering as I wandered back home. Obviously, I had some things to figure out. First, I had to deal with this new dilemma of my demise. That would be harder than I ever could have imagined. You can’t just settle into death. Believe me, it’s a big adjustment. The next thing I had to do was try to fit in with everyone else like nothing had ever happened, pretend to be human although everything within me was screeching out that I was not a part of humanity anymore. It was as if the social aspects of my soul were wiped clean when my life was cut off. The concepts of love and family were foreign. Connections were incomprehensible. But, I had to feign familiarity with people although I no longer knew them or had the desire to know them. I had to get my feet back onto the ground, feel something substantial, bring myself back down to earth from the floating glass state I found myself in.

My life was filled with a lot of disappointment.  But, of course, whose hasn't been?  I fumbled through my teenage years waiting for high school graduation so I could finally break off from the structure of adolescence and begin building my own life.  I had planned on following the usual route of college, of course, but it was my decision to do so, not the government's or my parent's.  I was going to do school my way, learning what I wanted to learn and choosing my friends instead of having them grouped into a classroom with me.  I was going to study hard, learn everything about everything and become fantastic.  It was my chance to slip out of my small town bubble and spread myself out in all directions and touch and be touched by intriguing people.  I wasn't dead yet but I felt like I hadn't lived.  I suppose that's silly to say because I was still a child.  It's not uncommon for children to not have lived a full life.  I wasn't abnormal but I was itching for something more than what I had experienced before, which wasn't much at all.  College, however, would change all of that.  Yes, it sure would, just not in the way I was hoping.

In fact, all these years later, I'm still dealing with just how much college would change my perceptions and reflections on life and people and the particulars of expiration.  Yes, I thought leaving my old life behind would save me.  It just killed me.  What a huge one-eighty, a gigantic slap in the face of everything I had spent years wishing and hoping and praying for.  I saw each one of my dreams crumble before me, one after the other.  The dream of a mentor crumbled.  The dream of finding friends who would understand me crumbled.  The dream of finding the artist within crumbled.  The dream of feeling like I was actually going to make it crumbled.  So, what do you do with that?  Negotiate, of course.  You haggle with heaven, make a deal with the devil, whatever you can do to keep going until you can leverage your life.  

I already knew that my animation career wasn’t going to take off when I got into the thick of my classes at college. It was a little disappointing but I tried not to get myself down. I thought that I’d be able to get a nice office job in a nearby city once I graduated, something simple to get by until I could afford the animation software and equipment to continue my training by myself. Nothing ever came up. After weeks of looking, I tried to expand my searches a bit. Looked closer to home. Nothing. Eventually, I started looking for any kind of work I could get. It's true when they say looking for a full-time job becomes a full-time job.  I sent out physical applications and online applications and collected newspapers to find jobs in the classifieds.  Resumes and cover letters infiltrated my dreams. Nothing. Meanwhile, feeling depressed over not being able to get a job and with a lot of time on my hands, I did the absolute worst thing possible: eat. Instead of working on my book or my fitness, I sat around and ate whole pizzas and bags of chips and candy. It was easier to turn myself off with food than it was to deal with the facts of my failure. I wanted an office job because of my previous experience and enjoyment of office work. It was easy. I didn’t have to deal with the public, which was a definite plus because I despised people. The office thing never developed because I didn’t have the necessary skills or experience so I reluctantly went back to the customer service route because that’s the only experience I have. I got the job at the bingo facility and it was horrible because of the work environment, rude customers and hour and a half drive each way every day. I literally only had time to eat, drive, work and sleep. My writing dwindled as my creativity dried up. I was working toward purchasing animation equipment and software but would it have been worth it if at the end of the day I was too tired to dookie, much less draw?

When that ended, I tried to go for the office work again, to no avail.  Eventually, I had to go back to my old retail job and grovel for them to hire me back.  All because I really need to buy that animation equipment and because my ridiculously expensive student loan payments were coming due.  The saddest part is I even tried more high-end retail jobs, places where you most likely wouldn't find cross-eyed old women with body odor that would choke a donkey.  But, no, I'm at a low-end clothing store filled with low-end co-workers and low-end customers.  Always settling, always lowering my standards.  Not because I want to.  Because I have to.  I settled so much after I died in the vain attempt to find some kind of normalcy, some kind of contentment.  I realized corpses can never be content.  Death is like a too-tight t-shirt.  It constricts not only your body but your movements and the nagging discomfort digs at your head, slowly worming its way in until it's all you can think about.  Settling, for the dead, is a lot like how paper cuts are for the living.  It's not one huge incident or tragedy but small pocket-sized miseries that multiply over time.  Settling, always settling just to try to find the breath that will never come.  I realized you can only settle so much before reaching sediment.

They say life is all about bargaining.  All humans have dreams but sometimes those dreams have to be compromised in order to find some measure of contentment.  Sometimes humans have to settle for something less to get to where they want to go.  You start out small and strive toward bigger things, start from the bottom and make your way to the top, work from the inside out.  Well, that also works in death.  Except in death, you're working from a smaller scale than the living, a lower level, less material to manipulate into something meaningful.  The problem with this is that it's nearly impossible to reach a satisfactory outcome.  It's hard enough to make it in life and death will set you back in a big way.  It's like digging a hole that pushes up it's own dirt.  No matter how much progress I've made, it's negligible, superficial, pointless, rendering me pointless, just spiraling downward...