I.
Life kicked me around a bit today. Rattled my cage. Shook the baby. Everything has been just a little bit off. For no good reason that I can see.
Then again, if I could see it, it wouldn’t be off.
These days seem to come more often now that I’m sober. Which I’m guessing is both a good and a bad sign. It’s good because I’m able to wrap my ahead around what a good day is supposed to look like; it’s bad because it means I expect them all to be that way.
And expectations are a bitch.
II.
My isolation/Now there’s a sobering thought/A minute alone, a lifetime too long/See the face in this mirror/So pale it could crack/Desperately wantin’ the color it lacks
The humidity in Muncie the last few nights has been unbearable in the sticky Midwestern way. Not like the Southwest’s watery stream way or the South’s wet blanket way. But unbearable just the same. The rain has tried to un-wring the air, unsuccessfully. Even the bugs have taken the week off, hiding in those places that bugs hide. The places we don’t find on purpose.
The weather slows you down. Makes you think before you do anything. Before you wear anything. Before you say anything. Because it all comes with a consequence.
And the damn thing about consequence is that you never see that coming either.
III.
So you drank with the lost souls/For too many years/Tied to their ankles now crippled with fear/Never been righteous though seldom were wrong/Life’s only life with you in this song
There’s an old joke, a toast actually, one that we have laughed about in my family for years: “I’d rather be with, than the finest people in the world.”
Being an alcoholic, I think about that. Often. For years, I gravitated to the gutters, the low points, the bottom because I felt home there. Or maybe it was just free of expectation. And consequence.
Which have a strange way of finding you down there anyway. Even if it takes a little longer.
IV.
Now there’s an ocean between/Where I am and where I want to be/So you prayers in doubt/Doubt not for me
Every few years, I ask one of my very best girl friends why we don’t date. It’s more an inquiry than an invitation, a probe to discuss why our love for each other is simply not the kind of love that translates into a partnership. A few years back, she flippantly said: “Because I know far too much about your past.”
I laughed. It is funny in the way things are funny between friends. But that line has stuck with me for a few years. Not because it was hurtful. Because it’s true.
Or there is a truth to it. Maybe this is a human truth. I don’t know of such things. It’s certainly a truth for me. The past, or more specifically my past, has broken me in very profound ways (which does not, as it turns out, make me profound in the present).
And the more I see and feel that in my life, the more I see and feel that as it reflects back to me from the people around, the more I understand why I find myself migrating farther — or is it further –away.
V.
I am profoundly confused by humans: Their capacities. Their contradictions. Their compassions.
They move in unexpected patterns, like the weather, and carry with them invisible, erasable lists made up of expectations and consequence and navigate through the present with emotional tethers in the past and the future.
And I wonder what it is that I have missed.