PART 53

Here it is. Morning morning morning morning. Like another stamp in the passport book of life. This one takes place in Miami and I’m struggling with it. The city sprawled out embarrassed like a child being changed out of his diaper. There’s something about waking up in a town that isn’t “yours” that creates this bubble around you. A feeble shell. Just for a long moment. Before coffee or talking out loud for the first time of the day. When your voice and brain are untested. It’s a selfish seclusion you get to sit in and feel alone. It’s maybe actually the only place I know of where you get to revel in loneliness.

There’s a line from Peter Pan that always get’s me.

“Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”

That line makes my hair turn grey. That line exhausts me. It’s mystic childlike Hemingway aloofness puts me in the middle of an emotional traffic jam that stretches past the horizon. It makes distances feel like chords in an orchestrated piece. It makes each line on a map distort into a story that leads you away from a feeling you can’t remember anymore. It’s a moment that falls into another and another and another until you stand up dazed in an empty theater wondering… where did everyone go? And who’s tux am I wearing? And what’s that taste in my mouth?

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about that word… loneliness. And what exactly it means and if it means anything at all. It’s this excepted THING we look at with brief glances. It’s the horrific act occurring around the corner we watch through the reflection of a hand mirror as to not be too involved. Now… sadness? We’re completely comfortable with that little fucker. Sadness is the brash brother that parades his medals in pop songs and dark eyed make up and wailing mothers at the edge of a grave. Loneliness is far less fortunate. It’s the dead dog in the middle of the street that no one wants to clean up… so we pretend it’s not there. Until it get’s smaller and smaller and somehow strangely disappears after a storm. Because loneliness has no charm and usually is seen like a stain on a new dress or a birthmark across a handsome face. It’s a tinge. It’s a sting from the bite of the bug called isolation. It’s fed by the mother’s milk of futility. It’s the inherent reaction to the growing distance from something you want to be near.

And then… It’s an idea you put upon yourself. That’s the think I have a hard time dealing with. The only thing loneliness takes to exist is you allowing it to. Like a host inviting in the parasite. Sometimes I see it at an evolutionary step that has turned into a weakness. Something that started out keeping us out of the trees or caves and close to the fire. And other times… I see it as a room mate you just can’t get rid of no matter how strong the hint. It’s there… leaving it’s shit all over your emotional bathroom counter.

And somewhere down in there I think maybe the older I get… the worse of a handle I have on details dealing with “the self.” Like I HAD a formula to break the code and I lost it the second I got a job or got laid for the first time. Oscar Wilde said, “I’m not young enough to know everything.” 

And maybe that’s it. Maybe the mystery wasn’t a mystery and now I’m just a sinking hole that grows bigger the more I fight that fact. Maybe instead being isolated, we’ve just forgotten. Maybe we’re not lonely, we’re just without any reference to the truth anymore. We’re confused and looking to blame something. Because we gave up the glowing gift. The ember of the child… for a goddamn chance to leave a mark in the world of other confused people sinking in their own holes.

Maybe we’re not lonely, we’re just guilty. Maybe that tinge we call loneliness is really just regret. And moments like standing in the “morning shell” of a new city or taking drunken cab rides with strangers can reveal glimpses of the old ember. The old stomping grounds of fearless living. Like Peter Pan looking at death as “an awfully big adventure.”  And my general misanthropic view wants to laugh at any attempts to find the old code we once knew. But the giant, hidden child inside of me pushes me to keep going. Clumsily and with any means nessissary to perhaps find a bit of luck in the dark.

Luck that could help catch the glowing orb ahead. To breath the wisp of smoke rising from a dying match. To leave the camp of the forgotten and to go back through the wilderness. Past caves and earth to climb the farthest tree that stands waiting. To climb and to climb and to leap out onto the one branch that is covered in the milk and honey that can only come with forgiving yourself. And to bath in the moonlight of a forgotten language that consists of nothing more the chanting words, “You are home and you always have been. You are home and you always have been. You are home and you always have been.“