November 21st and all is just as it is.
There's a man who has spent this day gathering together his divided life and throwing his meager possessions into some form of order. He's moving out of a friends house to get into an apartment with another friend, named Russ.
He want to tell you that moving in with Russ is giving him great waves of hope, but that would be a lie, and he's tired of lying. He's afraid that so much of what used to bless him as a person came from the truth he would speak about himself and the world that he touched. He's lost a great deal, perhaps all, of that grace.
His friends in this place are nothing less than amazing, and have nothing to do with his mood. Today he just feels like everything is over. As if everything he might have been is squashed flat like the remains of a chewed basketball.
He never thought that coming home would satisfy that certain something inside him that felt lost and lonely. He's never been delusional, or thoughtless. He knows that nothing outside himself can save him He knew that there was no place he could go that would solve the problems he faced. He knew that wherever he went, he would find himself there. What did he think then?
He did think that being at home would sorround him with effortless and comfortable love. That being at home, he would sorround himself with people that could not help but support him because of all the vital dependability they could offer. He found few people in Portland to love him completely, and those who did he shoved away as forcefully as he could, afraid that they might interupt his plans to someday move home to Ohio.
"I'll keep myself safe" he thought. "I'll have lots of fun and in the end nobody will touch me too much to hurt me."
What a fool time can make of us. Today he gathered the things he brought with him from Portland in that crappy car. For many of the items, he'd not touched them or moved them from the first night he arrived in Akron after that long drawn out, expensive car ride here.
He found amongst his things a graphic novel, parts and peices of some of the best X-Men story's ever told, or so it was advertized. His heart leaked out in pain when he remembered the hundreds of graphic novels that he'd given away to his friend Brett just before he'd left. The graphic novels seemed to represent what he was leaving behind. A childhood, or an innocence, or naivety. And movies...so many. Given away. Material possessions, obviously, but they represented more than just his youth, they also showed the culmination of effort and time spent to be in Portland.
He thinks about those gray wet streets today and his whole body aches with the passing of time, purpose, and meaning. He moves through his memory's like a stranger, picking up bits here and there of what things might have been. He ends up in the beginning.
A young man once stood in an airport with two suitcases and a carry-on..
His friend Kate comes to pick him up. Her and her girlfriend Chap gather together the peices of luggage and find places to store it in their hybrid car. There's a journey to an apartment which passes next to the tightly packed downtown area. The young man will spend teh first two months of his time here wandering around that downtown, meeting strange wonderful people and worrying about money. He'll spend the next two months looking for work, and finally finding it just before he thinks he'll have to move home. Time will enrich and ensnare him. He meets a strange man at a poetry reading, and wanders off with him for pints of bitter beer. They become fast close friends, building upon one another's strangeness to the city they both now live in. He'll meet a mowhawked lady with purple hair who runs an open-mic that he'll frequent from his third week in town. He'll read poetry there, and the crowd will sometimes be bored but sometimes be deathly starkly amazed. Many will come back again and again just to hear him read his words.
He'll fall in with various lovers, some short and a few he'll know for years. He'll never love one of them, afraid that they might demand more time and heart from him than he's ready to give. Someday, he might go home, he knows. Someday, this might all be a dream he's had.
He finds himself in the strangest places, the most intense of experiences, but through everything he'll find that people are attraced to his energy for the same reasons they will never truly know his love. His distance. His distance from them all will be what damns and saves him. He knows all the right moves and words, but cannot form the intent neceassary to let go. He'll be bottled up there, inside himself, and he'll never know how to tell them what that means.
The time will pass and the experiences become normalized. The differrences between that place and where he came from will be forgotten, until it seems that all places and time blend and whirl together in some vortex of happenings. He'll begin to convince himself that he's unhappy with where he is. The job has a lot to do with it. The job of serving the rich who steal from the poor.
He meets a man at a party and experesses his frustration, and the idea he has that he was meant to work with children. This man is simply a miracle, and gets the young man a job working with children before the next month is over. To the young man's surprise, he's as good at it as he'd pretended to be, and wanted to do it just as much as he postured. He moves up and on, to bigger jobs with more important consequences.
He finds himself in charge of too much. It's too real. It should be happening in Ohio, at home. It shouldn't happen here. This is not where he should find a career and a hopeful position. He destroys it then. He comes in late, hung-over, still drunk. He forgets things and destroys things and tries but fails to let his seemingly never-ending energy somehow save the day. He makes worse and worse choices, trying to destroy this thing that is too good for this place. This job might get in the way of going home someday. He finally quits.
Back to serving to the rich who steal from the poor now, he begins to corrupt and destroy his closest friendships. Anyone who might threaten to expose his deep well of constant regret will be annoyed into hating him or ignoring him. He pops the bubble of his closest friendships to stop them from killing him when he leaves. He begins to organize his affairs. He gives away his books, his movies, his bed. He gives away his dignity, his place, his hard-fought courage. He sells his kick-ass scooter and buys a crappy car. He drives home.
He gets here and places a chip on the table over and over again, only to have the cards beat him back, no matter how often he doubles his bets. The world begins to swallow him. He wants to fight back, but every struggle contains him more snuggly into the well.
What place is there here for him? What stand should he make? The ideas he has for what he wants to do go unsupported by those he loves here. He thinks he might go to school, only to have the people who count tell him that it's a bad idea. He thinks he might move back to Portland, but he'd only find the same sameness there as he sees here. He's the brick the sits alone in a field. He holds up nothing, he fits into nothing, and a building he does not make.
He does his best to breath.