A Life Not Spent

Lambda rising has closed. A great symbol of gay progressivism, reduced to a Comfort One shoes.

I’m waiting. Not sure what for, though I suppose I’ll know eventually. Once and many more times I thought the waiting was over. High school was my first life, and I perpetually dreamed of what would come after. Something grand, I think. I did leave my sad little hometown to go to college. In my 16 year old head that is grand enough. In my second life, the life on campus, I once again became restless for something grand. Then I graduated and became my own benefactor, and that’s life three. 

My third life is simultaneously the most boring and most interesting life of all (though I would not classify it as grand). In some ways I am done waiting because I can look back and actually see what I was waiting for, and those things have come to pass. Independence, love, a new way of seeing the people and world around me. But there’s more to come, more to wait for: a fourth life, and maybe a fifth if I’m lucky.

They are lives where I’m not necessarily done waiting, but I can finally start to not mind as much. Lives where the vague images I see in dreams are reality — of golden architecture haunted by ghosts of men and women and great art, and no permanent address, and a journal that’s not full of complaints about the mundane but something else, something bolder. I don’t usually see anyone with me, but that’s okay. People usually just stay in one life and don’t cross the border onto the next. Maybe there will be someone; they just haven’t entered the dreams of my next life yet.

But dreams are just dreams. Scattered moving images reflecting subconscious fears and desires. They aren’t a premonition of a fourth or fifth life. But I’ll keep waiting. Nothing better to do, I suppose.

Who would have thought it possible to be lonely surrounded by friends and living with a boyfriend in a huge metropolis? But I am, so no use splitting hairs. I can blame myself for part of the loneliness. I don’t accept invitations to go out nearly as much as I used to because – get this – I just want to be alone. Or I’m so twitchy and on edge that I can’t go out because I’m continuously crying. Then there’s the Boy. Boy is boring, but he didn’t use to be. People can change so much in just a few short years. The man who craved adventure as much as I do is gone. He has been replaced by the model for a cable package commercial, immersing himself in gadgets and various sports games. Late into the night I lay in bed crying or fantasizing about other Boys and how it would feel to just get up, leave the apartment, find them, and fuck them. I think it’d feel pretty good.

I think about my job and I get a punch of butterflies to the gut. My manager, Alex, has been the cause of a double daily intake of my anti-anxiety medication since he arrived a few short months ago. Thinking about him makes me sneer. I hate that son of a bitch. He is so like my dad, and my reaction to him is so like my reaction to my dad. Dad/Alex: Screaming insults will somehow make you motivated to do better work! Me: Continuously striving to impress you will somehow, someday work, and when it doesn’t, I’ll keep trying! Please like/love me!

Too bad. I really wanted to leave that childhood behind.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been happy – so many years and stories ago. Six years might as well mean permanent. I will always miss that girl. Turning into a woman changed her. When I see her smile in photographs I cry because her face is so lit up and carefree, while that same face looks downtrodden and resigned when the woman she became smiles. I will never be that girl again. I have no talents to speak of, and even the things I love I’m not good at. Writing. Drawing. Graphic Design. History, my first academic love, is useless when it comes to getting a paycheck. Then there’s the eating disorder and the mental illness. What exactly is the fucking point of living like this? Why would I stay? What and who is there to stay for? Friends who live so far away they forget about me. A family that does things to my medication dosages that even Alex can’t. A boyfriend who I’m not sure I love anymore.

Nah, I think it’s time to go. But where? Now that’s a question that makes me smile. Maybe just a small town in upstate New York or Pennsylvania. I’ll work as a bartender and bike to a lake and go for an evening swim. I’ll rent a small house for the price of a week’s worth of groceries in this damn city. Maybe the house will be on the lake. I’ll have big comfy couches and walls upon walls of bookshelves. I’ll have a deck that overlooks the water and some nights I’ll fall asleep reading on an Adirondack chair, then wake up to a cool mist over the still water.

In the winter I’ll build fires in my stone fireplace and read even more. I’ll talk to locals at the bar as I serve them drinks and hear stories from people passing through. I’ll make just enough. I’ll miss things like new clothes, but I don’t think fashion will matter much in a place like this.

I’ll still travel. No reason not to. I can save up for the trips I’ve always wanted to take. The overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg. India. Thailand. Italy again (it’s just so beautiful, why not?).

I hope to meet someone. Preferably someone who hates sports, but that may be a bit of a stretch. Someone who has a sheepdog but doesn’t want kids.

I hope I keep writing and getting better at it. Maybe my story will be interesting enough someday to put in a book, though I doubt it.

I grabbed my bag and turned to leave when I realized I was turning my back on this room for the last time. I turned back to face it and tried desperately to drink in every last shadow and corner, to memorize the exact shades of blue and green on the walls — as if I might forget the room I slept in for ten years. I touched the wanesgoat on my closet, wishing I could talk to it, say goodbye. I finally cried, though I don’t know why. This was the house in which I fought with my dad relentlessly and violently. I was abused, hopeless, and alone in this house, and I was grateful when I left to start a life elsewhere. I had only been back to visit a handful of times, and it had never felt like home. Why now? Why should I be sad to say goodbye for the last time? I clutched the door frame, trying to communicate my last goodbye to an empty, soulless room. And then I turned away, a goodbye not worth my time.

I was brought up to believe that is was shameful to not be able to “deal with the real world.” Those kinds of people became professors or worked for nonprofits. They weren’t strong enough to deal with the way life works. This is how life works: Do well in school. Go to a good college. Get a good job. Work hard. Be competitive. Make money. Take the occasional vacation. Retire, and die. But we have been lied to: that formula for success is not a formula for anything but living a completely ordinary and easily forgotten existence.

And not being able to deal with “the real world” is not shameful because the real world was made up. It is fake and unyielding. It is uncreative and abusive. If suffocates your soul and tells you to abandon your dreams because your dreams aren’t practical in this so-called “real” world.

Advertisement propagandize us, but not as much as our communities and jobs. Communities that look down on small homes and old clothes. People that would rather call the police about a homeless man than offer him food. Jobs that tell us our office is our home and our co-workers are family. This is sinful and disgraceful. Our home is not where we sit completing tasks for a paycheck. Our home is a sanctuary - a sacred place filled with sacred people (our actual family). To insinuate that we make our jobs sacred is a sad and pathetic notion made up by those who couldn’t deal with what the real world actually is: a beautiful opportunity to discover each other in an effort to leave the world better than we found it.

It is not politics. It is not great civilizations or empires. It is not war or even peace. It is not a spreadsheet that will raise one share a fraction of a percent. It is not most things in the world because people made up most of those things to avoid confronting their humanity and the humanity of others. Because that, not anything else, is too real. And it is a travesty that the things that are so precious have been miscarried into something so fake, and yet so often thought to be real.

So no, I can’t deal with what our parents, teachers, counselors, and pastors call the real world. I am not ashamed; I am simply trying to be real.

You can always tell when a train has crossed over into a bad neighborhood. It’s not the riders; it’s the train. It suddenly looks a little more dirty and worse for wear, like it’s not bothering to dress up.

How often do I miss school? Every day. All the time. Every labor day when it’s so muggy and hot I can barely stand it, but there’s a feeling of oncoming cool, and I know where I should be but am not. Every June when I look forward to summer then realize there’s nothing after it. Every day when I wake up and come home bored. Every time I catch a kid in a backwards baseball cap cramped in the corner of a crowded bus studying some messy history notes. In august when the stores display their shiny back to school wares. I miss it then and now and probably always, but most especially when I realize I don’t get to go back to that time. Even as a I grasp at pseudo-intellectual articles about world affairs and textbooks gathering dust on my bookshelf, I know it’s not the same. I am losing my ability to absorb, and I have little to show for my time as an adult. 

9:30pm. The television is radiating onto my cross-legged figure with images of Futurama. I’m five episodes in and still waiting. 11:00pm. Bender is getting on my nerves. One more episode. 11:30pm. No sign of you. I go to bed and fall asleep easily. 12:30am. I hear you enter the apartment and quickly fall back asleep. 4:00am. The bedroom door creaks open, and you finally join me in bed. Why didn’t you come sooner?

You said you kissed me when you came home, but I didn’t feel it.

There’s a time of day when everything falls silent and still, and you know, not feel, that you’re alone. You may be at work or at the gym. Grocery shopping. Staring at the little lights behind your eyelids as you try to sleep flat on your back at 4am while the person next to you snores quietly, and you know you should feel content but you’re too alone to feel anything at all.

It’s the time we realize that we have nothing but ourselves. The people around us don’t exist, except to themselves, and they, too, are alone. No one believes it, but they all know it. For one moment each day, we all know, without doubt, that there is no one else. We float through a world on our own, inventing our surroundings and creating characters for our own universe.

Of course it’s all real. The world is real. The others are real. But they are not with us, and we are not with them. We are I. We are no one, and we are everyone. Alone.