Save your concern for someone else

Lately I find myself sick of what I am sick of. Longing to take back the too far gone, wondering if I gave up the hope that compelled me to try my best regardless or in spite of the outcome. Perhaps I gave up long ago. Is it a skill to be recovered? Is it even necessary? I think it must be refashioned according to the changes I experience, and maybe that phenomenon is already occurring, maybe all this concern is just a symptom.

I didn’t realize how early on this life began to feel little more than a game most of the time. And the brief pauses that give way to collapse, that suspend me in a blissful haze of opalescent lilac and beige and forgiving grey—the kind of grey that summons surrender rather than despair—that haze then aligns me with a sense of freedom so bittersweet in its fleeting grace, in its imprinted, ruthless wisdom yet delicate embrace.. and then shadows emerge, beautiful in their proof, their symbolism of accompanying light. Suddenly this life is no longer a game, but almost too real to bear.. almost.. and maybe it seems like a curse that there never exists an in between, but it’s quite the opposite to me.

I hardly make sense of anything anymore. I think I am finally starting to live. At times it feels like my body rejects it—no that’s just a hangover—but in defiance my thoughts march on, traverse across ground bloodied and battered from the stomping, vengeful march—my mind’s attempt to rebel against its default state of loitering, idleness, maybe false complacency (but why does it have to be false? Oh because I’m not a wannabe yuppie whose entire sense of being is chained solely to conventional success? Approval? Right). So maybe my mind tends to seek the easy way out, and fine my mind is sometimes a spoiled brat dancing around the delusion that it was once promised something and is now resentful of almost everything. But then my mind pulls itself out, scrapes off the dried maroon streaks and stripes of frenzied gall and carries on again, tripping over what appears to be moon craters, or was it overgrown tree roots, or was it the etchings in ornate stone tile—it’s all of those and nothing at all. It is the mind, after all.

More often than not I have about as many drinks in a single day as one is supposed to have across an entire week. Obviously this needs to change. Necessity has never been a very enticing incentive to me. I have always delineated the concept of needing to do something and pressure to do it. There are many things I have been told I “needed” to do, many of them centered around taking care of myself or appeasing others, yet I have scraped by better than fine through shortcuts and other creative measures. Sometimes I even manage to appear better than those who are so committed to those “necessary” things it’s as though they’re going to be tested for them. But the benefits of youth are never forgiving—I’m betting on borrowed time and whatnot—and my behavior and the crazy shit that I think, then say, then act upon is anything but subtle, which either dims my glow to most people or enlivens it to the other crazy ones.

I really got away with being on drugs after school, sometimes at school, out wandering the streets, sometimes inside my family’s homes.. for years. And it was only until this year that people have begun to express “concern.” This concern immediately disgusts me, someone will tell me so and so is worried about how you’ve been acting, we just care about you, we just want this and that and please stop talking shut the fuck up. I hate to concern them more with this reaction, but do any of them know me enough, and they couldn’t have been there because it was when I needed someone most that I would have never reached out for anything at all. To them I bite my tongue, through gritted teeth just barely escaping a passive aggressive thank you, I’ll be okay. And they don’t have to trust me, or even believe in me, sure it would be nice if they did, but that’s beyond me. I’m entirely aware of how far I’ve sunk before anyone could possibly think to look for me at the bottom. They think they’re looking down on me, so let them. All I know is that down here I’m much closer to breaking through.