I had a visitor today. 

I decided a long, long time ago that I didn't want to live.  Somewhat more recently, I discovered that I really don't want to kill myself.  And so I exist in a grey zone of inaction; I do nothing to engage life, yet I do nothing to end it.  (Except perhaps ask dead relatives to retrieve me.)

Of course, this is an exaggeration.  I do some things to engage life.  I breathe.  I eat.  I even go out of the house to visit the supermarket.  And I have a job.  I pretend to hate my job.  Likewise, the people at my job tolerate my tantrums and whining.  I do hate almost everything about my job, but there is at least one thing I appreciate about it; it gets me out of the house. 

I encounter people like me on occasion, and I can't stand them.  They complain all the time, and they employ an unrelenting negativism as if they believe their life depends on it, as if they would be swept away by some evil force if they let slip for a moment their obsession with despair. 

It is easy to hate.  And maybe that's all it is; a preference for what is easy.  There is no emotional risk, no investment in a relationship with another, and no happiness.  The most powerful advantage of choosing to hate everything is that it makes you more powerful than anything that might otherwise take your happiness away. 

I keep trying to find the cause of my misery, this stone in my shoe that makes me so unwilling to stride into life.  It won't matter much if I figure out the cause, in fact there probably isn't a cause, and that is why it is so perfect a search.  It will never end, keeping me forever preoccupied.  And now that I have avoided living for so long, I am afraid to resume living even if I decided I wanted to. 

My visitor wanted money.  He didn't really care what he would have to do to get it.  He asked if I wanted to do a quickie with him for ten bucks.  I have paid him for sex in the distant past, but he is not above robbery.  He thinks I am a slave to sex, and he may be right, but that is exactly why I won't do it with him.  He also thinks that I have little self-respect, and will always seek escape rather than confrontation, no matter how demeaning.  About this he is entirely correct. 

He exuded the scent of pot smoke, an aroma I did not find at all objectionable.  He was dressed in all black.  He has light brown hair, and he has a big bright smile which he flashes far too quickly for it to be believed, especially since he harbors a great deal of rage.  He has told me a few things since the distant past. 

He took out a Marlboro and his lighter.  I told him he couldn't smoke inside.  I cannot stand cigarette smoke, especially when it turns stale and lingers.  It's funny that I could tell him he couldn't smoke, but I couldn't tell him to leave. 

I made some coffee, which seemed to take forever, and then we sat in an uneasy silence, with an akward space between us.  He mentioned his son.  He needs to buy a book for his son.  "How old is the boy?" I asked. 

"Ten," he replied.  He estimated that we have known each other for seven, maybe eight years.  I smiled.  I knew him before his girlfriend got pregnant. 

"I think it has been a little more than ten years," I said.  "How fast the years slip by when you are hiding from them." 

Then the awkward silence returned.  We sipped coffee and glanced about.  We never allowed our gaze to settle on each other. 

He asked if he could borrow some money until Friday.  I gave him a twenty.  He said he'd leave it at my front door Friday afternoon, and to look for it when I got home from work.  I dismissed his good intentions and said, "Don't bother."  The way I saw it, I wasn't lending him twenty, I was paying him to leave. 

That's crass, I know.  And he was probably offended.  He might well have paid me back if I respected his promise, even if it was only a pretense.  I gave him nothing along with that twenty, no trust, no faith, no goodwill.  If I was him, I wouldn't pay me back. 

I don't have to change.  I mean, nothing in this world requires it.  I can continue in fear, negativsm and isolation, and if, for example, I get an apartment with my friend Bobby, the only change will be that more people will pass through my house, observing my sad lonliness.  I have become the dispensible friend, the one whose absence nobody notices.  It appears I have been trying to achieve that for a long, long time. 

The change is instantaneous.  And it is never finished.  It is the overnight change we observe in Scrooge when he wakes from his fateful dreams.  And it is the two-thousand day transformation of Heinrich Harrer, in Seven Years in Tibet, from being egocentric and arrogant to being just simply kind and generous.  There is no recipe to make it happen, no sequence to follow which will make the change come and present itself like a new set of clothes. 

I guess it is just a choice, a choice of perspective, a choice to face the world with a smile instead of a scowl, and a choice to welcome with open arms everything that I have been avoiding.  Anything else is just pretending to have control of things which I do not control.  So the choice is this; accept life as it really is, or make up an alternative, which isn't real.