I had a complicated birth. I should’ve died, but didn't, not because I’m strong or special, but because there was nothing better to do. My life is a mistake, has been a pain, not only to my mother, who was too old to have me, but the world in general, which like my mother gives me moments of intense pleasure, happiness and gratitude, while simultaneously making me filled with horror, anxiety and the knowing incomprehension of being alive. Having love’s umbilical cord wrapped around your neck until you are blue might make you guilty of a crime before you’re even born.
Could it be that I should’ve never had life, that I’d been predisposed to death and somehow cheated, by cutting in line to the living, essentially being a fugitive of death. Time weighs on me, yanks my thinking, pulls me through the dirt, dragged by the horses of memory, a slave to the past, a dreamer of the future, an employee of the present, enjoying every moment of pleasure and pain but for the most part unaware, simply sucking air and savoring the moment of escaping.
Since the beginning of time, not Adam and Eve, but my consciousness, I’ve felt like an outsider, where the world was a harmonious place, while I was a piece of dirt put in the sprocket of its perfection, something to screw up the gears of life, always feeling out of place, without the bearings of a North Star. It’s put me at the edge of thinking, looking down, into the abyss of human invention, with the big toe of reason digging into the limited ground of where one stands on any issue. I reach conclusions, making sense out of the personal confines of a unique existence, searching for a way out, in, or around the explanation for what’s unanswerable.
Yesterday, I had some incisive thoughts about life, but I was too busy to document them, as time slipped by being too engaged, not with those thoughts but something completely different. Perhaps the view, the moment, some smell or pain hidden somewhere deep inside my body (or head?), but maybe not, perhaps the realization that my mind’s like quicksand, like a secret panel inside an empty box, dangerous, sweet and void. I remember nothing but the outline of a fantasy, a bubble of hot air, floating like a self-centered balloon of wishful thoughts, words written on a page automatically typed onto the carbon paper of amnesia, where I’ve divined the art of fooling myself into an actual belief.
Contemplation. The ambiguity of what the world lays out in front of our eyes, a world we've come to know, expecting nothing but the familiar, the ordinary clock work of being who you are, which is what? Each question just another roadblock on the highway to where? The mind’s a troublemaker, with more puzzles to solve with every answer you stumble upon by accident, hard work or simple dumb luck.
What do I remember? Most everything, even those little moments doing nothing, walking somewhere, purchasing nothing special, devouring a piece of a good, bad or indifferent memory. Life is hunger, the search for something good to digest, sometimes there’s a maraschino cherry on top or the rotting idea of time.
I see the outlines of yesterday, they almost seem real, but in their abstraction lose the appearance of relevance. How touching, everything out of reach, plus the desire to grasp that conundrum. I remember starting this mental talking to, attempting to put words into action, making my life more than the echo of a human language.
To make matters even more convoluted, you revisit all the obstacles laid down by unresolved memories, all that time you'd like to take back, correct with the #2 pencil of second chances, erasing mistakes, correcting the spelling of stupid plans, and the bad grammar of living life like you're forever young and don't give two shits about what's down the pike. The obsession of living is simply to be alive, skipping the tragedy at the end. That big unsolvable equation called tomorrow.
There’s a blank. I waited for this nothing to become something with a wave of my magician's wand, to put into words all the thoughtlessness flowing through me like a river, to make heads or tails of the body I drag around just for the fun of being alive. I was lying in bed, staring at the sky, looking at the ceiling. I was whispering secrets into deaf ears of contemplation, attempting the perception of a sensation, simply to put words onto a page, aligning those scratches with reason, making sense like lunch, a bed or love, fashioning the moment and making it meaningful, righting the empty spaces to be filled in later, putting nonsense in order.
There were so many times I almost died, falling off the fourth floor balcony, chased by rabid feelings down a chronological road, breaking almost every bone in my body, engaging in street fights with strangers in broad daylight, being a participant in a life of near-misses, lost in a forest without a sky, pondering life’s light and the missing clue to being so insular.
I pour a glass of half-truths and give myself a pep talk about the narcotic of tomorrow’s possibilities. I’m doing one-hand push-ups and skipping rope to the music of my roach-like endurance in the beautiful mirage of who I am. All good things must end, but I’m stronger than the question of time. When I trip over myself, I get up and feed the fire of my burning drive. I never should’ve been born, because I love life too much, a glutton of time, obese from the empty calories of hope.