And Oh, About That Thing

I am not sure.
I don’t know what there is about me.

I don’t know why I made it as far as I have or why I escaped, or why I got away and other people remained stuck or jammed in the same position.
I am not sure why it was me who survived, at least in some regards.
Either way, I can say that I have outrun at least some of my demons.

Years back, there was a teacher who cornered me in the back of my eighth-grade classroom. He pushed in close. His awful breath reeked of coffee from the teacher’s lounge and his overweight body, and his oversized hands leaned on me, pushing my back to the wall.
No one else was in the classroom. This was in-between the bells that rang throughout the school and split the periods from one to the next.

I was scrawny and small and hiding a million casualties in my heart. I was afraid of everyone, yet, I tried to wear a mask and to keep me painless. Hence, my use of eight-hour trips and long lasting psychedelic drugs, which were able to alter me into someone numb and distant. If nothing else, I could excuse my discomforts and awkwardness by accusing the drugs and say, “hey, what do you want from me? I’m high.”
I remember the classroom and where I was when the teacher pushed me into the wall.
I remember the teacher too.
He was a large man. I remember my other incidents in the school that happened with other teachers, which led me to other bouts of public humiliation. While I can understand the frustration and outrage that was caused by my behavior, no teacher has the right to lay their hands on a student—especially when that teacher outweighs the student by more than 200lbs.

I will not regard this teacher by his real name; however, he was widely known as Fred Flintstone because his physical appearance matched the loudmouth, oversized cartoon character.
Flintstone told me that I would be dead before I was 18.
He said that he couldn’t wait to watch me die and that he was going to laugh and either spit or piss on my grave.
I swore that I would get even with him, one day.
And I did, but not physically.

I saw him years later after a court case of mine, which was violent and unfortunate. I was armed when I saw this man. However, I was not a small boy anymore. But he was still big, fat, bloated and miserable.
I realized that even if I put a bullet in his brain that I would be doing him and his miserable life a favor.
What a sad fat man he was. But he is irrelevant to me now.

No one picked me.
What I mean is no one ever looked at me and said that I would be the one to make it. In fact, I never thought I would make it out alive. Sometimes, I’m not sure if I did make it out alive.
Life is filled with irony and contradictions.
Either way-
I say we die more than once. I say we die figuratively, far more than we do when we die literally.
I say we die in stages. I say we die when we are alive, more times than we care to revisit. But yes, somehow, pain and sorrow and all that was mixed in-between yet, somehow; I made it out alive—at least to some degree.

No one predicted that I would do much with my life. No one thought I would be much except a bum, or to be locked away somewhere or dead at a young age. No one predicted me to be anything more than another statistic, or to be a future drain on our society, hemmed up, or jammed up in some kind of socially cancerous life, homeless, bound by a drug or forever housed in a psychiatric lockdown.

What do you want from me?
I’m crazy,
Right??

I do not consider myself to be a pillar of strength. I do not think I am strong at all. In fact, my weaknesses are the ones that almost killed me.

So, what have I done?
What have I beaten?
Who am I?
Who will I become?

Some might say that I got off lucky.
Some would say that I don’t deserve the credit for who I am or where I am. To be clear, some would say that I must have an angel over my shoulder or that someone “Upstairs” must really like me.
Maybe this is true . . .

I understand when people talk and tell me to look on the bright side of things.
This is hard when your vision is blurred.
But I get it.
I understand why people say to change my thinking.
I get that too.
I do okay though.
I understand when people tell me “Put some gratitude in your attitude!”
I hate that saying almost as much as I hate the saying “it is what it is!”

It’s hard. You know?
It’s hard to see the forest from the trees.
It’s hard to see the sun when the clouds are overhead.
And yes, this is life.
Life is hard.
So was school.
So was learning how to read out loud without stuttering.
So was the belief that I was deserving of being hurt.
So was the awareness of being hurt and touched as a little boy.

So were the beatings I took.

Know what else is hard?
Love.
Unreturned love.
Rejected love.
Dishonest love.
Disloyal love.

It’s hard to see oneself as meaningful and desirable when love goes wrong. Yes, I have had my share of pain and rejection.
I have had challenges with intimacy.
I made mistakes. Plenty!

And, as a result:
Yes, I’ve lied. I admittedly hurt the best people I knew.
I lost more than I could ever gain back
(unless I change my ways).
I say this openly and honestly.
However, what have I done?
What do I plan to do?
Better yet, what do I want to do?
More importantly, when am I going to begin?

Today is a day of hope.
This is Easter Sunday, and rather than enter into the religious debates about God or the existence of God, I like the idea of love. I like the sentiment and hopefulness that there is a promise that I can be saved or that I can be better and that I can go beyond the sad predictions that come from people who chose against me.

I don’t know if I have ever seen God before.
But I have seen the devil
more than once.

I walked away from a different life to find myself alone.
I did this poorly but . . .
Am I alone now?
Or is this just the scene before the good part begins and the movie is about to get much better.
The script has yet to be written.
Am I right?

When I was a kid, I used to keep my little poems in a box beneath my bed.
But those notes are long gone and that person who wrote them is grown and all that remains of them.

I think I’m going to go back to sending myself notes, like the reminders of things that I accomplished. I have an idea for my next journal, which I plan to move forward with, despite the votes against me.

And oh, about that thing . . .

To my friend who passed.

Thank you for being my friend.
Ride or die.
I will never deny you.
We worked together.
We sat together, and we talked together.
We swore together.
I have no regrets.
And I never will.

Sleep well my friend and who knows?
Maybe we will talk again –

someday.