What would I be if I weren't a bitchy, pain-in-the-ass, grumbling, frowning, miserable prick?  Would I be the Pope?  ...the Queen of the Netherlands?  ...a jowly, cigar-chewing sportswriter in New Jersey?  Nah.  No offense to any in that unlikely trinity, but I would be none of them.  Would I still be bald?  Yeah.  Would I still be a little overweight, and a little out of shape?  Oh, yeah.  Would my breakfast continue to be a pot of coffee, my lunch a pizza, and my dinner a pint of ice cream?  Probably. 

If I weren't a bitchy prick, I wouldn't hide as much as I do now.  I would get out of bed before noon.  I wouldn't wait until dark to walk to the store.  I'd feel more scared, but I'd be less afraid.  I'd sing in the shower. 

I'd cry.  Maybe no more than I do now, but there'd be a flow to it, and with a destination, too.  That flow would rinse-out the mildewed sponge that has held the body of my tears for decades.  It wouldn't stink anymore, and I'd throw that ratty sponge away. 

If I wasn't a bitchy prick, I'd see that I am kinda cute, a little bit.  And I'd see that the monsters would be monsters no more --they'd all turn back into regular people, they way I used to see them, the way they have always been.  They'd once again become potential friends, and I would once again become one, too. 

That's a pretty cheery view, like it's a clear and sunny blue-sky day, and I'm driving on an empty highway through green mountains and over shining crystal-clear rivers, on my way to somewhere, going some place. 

Everything is so beautiful, so beautiful.  Everything.  If I weren't a bitchy prick, I don't know how I'd manage.  I don't know how I would manage at all. 

I hate everything.  I love you. 

I love everything.  I hate me. 

Does this or that matter; the memory of Christmas trees, of training wheels, of sibling rivalries?  Did I dress-up for Mass, once upon a life?  Did I cry in terror from the roller coaster? --heaving galeful sobs, loud and wet and unrestrained, as if I believed I deserved relief?  Or is that a former incarnation bleeding into this?  Have I already lived and died?  Maybe I have just not lived.  Maybe I won't have to die. 

If I try and bare my soul here, what will you see?  What if it is a completely other thing --an alien within me that, for whatever reason, I don't want to see?  What then?  Will you tell me that I am nuts?  If I write merely to expell what is inside --is that bad?  Or should I write primarily to compel and to illuminate?  (As if I could.)

Welcome to expellatory writing.  You'd be surprized, it's not nearly as rancid and rabid as most of the times when I try to actually say something.  I think it's the process of trying to actually say something that makes me bitter.  As long as I try not to speak, or scream, or wail, or send up flares for help from a world that I imagine exists somewhere outside of me, waiting to send rescue helicopters and valiant frogmen for me; a world outside of me that is not a disaster, that has not abandoned me, that does not let little boys like me send up flares unheeded...  As long as I try not to speak, or to "say something," there's a chance what's really inside might actually come out. 

And that's the danger, too. 

What became of me?  "Make something of yourself," said the betrayers, and so I set about doing nothing of the sort.  I wanted them to see the rift between us, so I defied them, hoping they would come to investigate my defiance, and then would see --and remove-- the barrier between us which they had inadvertantly placed, and which I sorely lamented.  At first I couldn't move it --that wall between my beloved betrayers and me.  I tried, I tried, I tried, I tried, I tried, ItriedItriedItried.  Now, in my adulthood, I suppose I could move it, if I tried.  But I have been camped up against it for so long that removing it at this late stage would mean losing my home. 

People come to me with their tenderest aches, the ones they can't --they're not allowed to or they're too afraid to-- show to anyone in their life.  So they go outside of their tribe, beyond the people in their life --their own beloved betrayers-- and they look for a harmless, broken-hearted one like themselves.  They look for a little child hiding inside of every person they meet, a child who believes still in rescue helicopters, that fly from a world of beloveds who do not betray.  They look for one like me, and they find me. 

I want to be like the character in the fiction which I imagine writing someday; he screams a loud release, with utter unselfconsciousness, every time he comes, which in my character's case would be every morning right about dawn while he is in the shower, just when all his neighbors are beginning to stir.  His scream, most days, would be the first loud sound of the day, startling even the raucously chattering birds of dawn.  He is, however, afraid to sing in the shower, for fear that someone in his building, or that a stranger passing by outside, might hear him and recoil.  His self-esteem is prohibitively fragile.  But for some things, for some things, he is able to completely suspend any self-judgement whatsoever; he has the capacity in brief and fleeting moments to be thoroughly and entirely whatever he wants to be.  For whatever reason, those brief and fleeting moments occur for him in the shower at 4:45 AM every day, when he jerks off. 

I have not made much of myself, nor have I become any of the many better things I could have become.  I have provided the compassion others sought, and I have shared the lonliness of others like myself who were absolutely isolated in plain sight.  But I have never screamed in the shower, nor have I cried out in untethered ecstasy from anyplace, either sacred or profane. 

If I could, for just an instant, let go of it all completely, all the inhibitions and doubts, all the tentativeness and reluctance, all the crippledness and the fear, then I know I could fly, and all the rest would be a cinch.  If I could fly I could stop waiting for the rescue helicopters to come and save me --they were never real anyway.