sometimes I want to die. And then I don't. Die, I mean. Some parts of me would prefer that I just disappear from the world, as if I never existed. They have not gotten their wish. A friend (is he a friend? was he?) said once that it is fairly easy to opt out of life. He was right. He was probably speaking of me, but had chosen to speak in the impersonal voice as though making a generalization, trying to not offend me. I guess he was. A friend, I mean. He didn't say it was simple to stop living, he didn't say it was the easiest thing. He said it was 'fairly easy', which perhaps revealed his appreciation of how painful that option might be, though he never chose it for himself. I envy him, for he has such a good grasp on life in this world. And I am constantly oversteering.
I'm forty-two; I still ride a bike. I fiddle endlessly, in writing, with meaningless matters of self-pity —an obsessive emotional scatology. I like music from the seventies. In my head, I am stuck somewhere between eighth grade and real life. There's a terrible grieving to be done when I get out of my head —if I ever do.
Once, in 1983, I discovered that while waiting for dawn to come, despair can be quite severe, and the relief which came with the first light and the first birdsongs was stunningly transformative. My life's perspective traversed instantly the vast gulf between despair and hope, all for the arrival of a little light. Suddenly I was no longer mourning my inevitable demise, or fantasizing about effective means of suicide. Suddenly I was eagerly anticipating contact with the world, looking forward to vying for coffee and sticky-buns among others starting their day. Like I was one of them. A child playing 'adult', a pre-formative personality masquerading as a person. It was fun for a time.
perhaps that is the final coming of age; discovering, learning, and finally accepting that we are not one of them, we are not 'of' anything; we are alone in an anguished uniqueness —anguished as long as we lament it, relieved when we accept it. This is, I imagine, all greek to you because, I imagine, it all has more to do with my malformed psyche than with reality. And I know it all sounds like new age mumbo-jumbo, with sickeningly sympathetic language, something like that of a 'group-therapy facilitator', but it's all about boundaries, boundary issues, a lack of healthy boundaries. It is a shame that a label so diminishes its object, and inevitably minimizes the nightmare which it seeks to capture in a word or a phrase. But that is in part the purpose of a label— to tame a fragment of reality within a concept and, multiplied, thereby contain the universe.
Who I am is not part of who you are; my place is not— either partly, or wholly— inside your pretty white fence of minature pickets and happy posies, even if you want it so. Not even if we both want it so. To overstate the painfully obvious, who I am is who I am. Less obvious but no less painful is the fact that who I am is a place I have not been, with borders undefined and overgrown; overrun by indifferent vandals; located on a quiet sunny lane I've not been down, among neighbors I've not met, in a community and a world in which, for some reason, I have never seemed to belong. Such is the nightmare of living as if boundaries don't exist. There is no 'me' of any real significance, and I am overwhelmingly intimidated by any definitive 'you' —whether that person is a stranger, a potential friend, or a lover.
I don't think this would be of interest to anyone, so why do I write it here?
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