This is to you folks.
This is to you, the moms, the dads, the married and to the divorced and all the in-between people in this world.
And this is to you too.
Absolutely, this is to you!
This is to the kids, the sons and daughters, adopted, step, and to the biological and the otherwise.
This is to the brothers and sisters or the people who are connected by the fabric of this thing which we call family.
This is also to you, the mismatched lovers who wish for more or wish they were elsewhere.
Find your way.
Make is so and above all else . . .
Do not waste another day!
I say this to you a humble as my nature allows. I say this without pride, without ego, and without the need to dazzle or be poetic and so meaningful with my words.
I do not say this is a warning.
No. No one reads about warmings anymore.
We all think we know better.
If anything, I offer this as qualified advice which comes after a downfall, and then after a rebuild, and followed by another downfall that fell worse than the priors before it.
I want to say this as plainly and as truthfully as possible. And, if I may, I want to be clear because words like this are often lost in the sauce, so-to-speak.
And we go and we overthink and overanalyze and as we go on our way to another daily chaos, we miss so many great things, like dance recitals or a chance to say goodnight to someone.
Or we miss the chance to hear the first words of a child or see someone ride a bike for the first time.
We can miss the world in an instant and so on and so forth, we find ourselves in an empty void, hollow and echoing in the cruelest way possible.
I believe that alienation of a person is a crime and yes, this is a punishable crime, or at least it should be.
And yes, this is an arguable fact; however, I have seen what happens when we lose people, places, and things.
I have had the unfortunate lesson of entering a small place, which I called my apartment. I know what it’s like to go home and to have no one there, no one waiting for me, and to talk to and no one to regard.
Again, I do not want this to get lost in the sauce because we often devour the meat of the obvious until all that we consumed is gone.
And then?
Then we find ourselves far down the road, older perhaps and looking back, and wishing for a “do-over,” or a way to go back to a past that no longer exists.
This is too important to overlook so, please.
Do not let this be you.
Appreciate what you have.
Cherish it.
Love all you have until it bleeds from your skin.
Do not waste time sitting at tables of people whom you do not belong with.
Go where you dream
Be who you dream to be.
And by all means, love the person you love.
We all want a second chance. Or maybe a third chance or even a fourth.
But these things are not always available.
Doors close.
And some close forever.
We all wish that we could go back and remove the unerasable mistakes, especially the painful ones that lingered in our minds for life or longer.
“For life or longer.”
This is a line from a movie and to me, this line has more meaning than most would understand.
But either way, for life or longer means this is a promise that will never die and thus, the people who we made our promises to will always be alive because promises like this should never be broken.
I know
I promise
For life or longer.
I say this and yet, I say this as a man who wasted too much and missed too many things.
I fought too often and surrendered too little to understand the wars I fought and arguments were all too meaningless; and in the end, pushing people away only put them where I placed them
Away from me. . .
I do not blame anyone for my downfalls or my mistakes. And nor do I blame anyone for my bouts with loneliness or the feelings of being ostracized and left out.
Hence, like Charles Dickens wrote about the spirits of Christmas who came to visit Ebeneezer Scrooge in The Christmas Carol, I come here as a voice of the past, the present, and the unknown future which is yet to be.
Please note –
These things we hold onto… these heavy and burdensome ideas and misunderstandings lead us to mistaken identities and the grand misperceptions of life; and these ideas of us and of who we are to each other and how we miss out on the chances of who we dream to be is far more valuable than being right or winning an argument.
Stop fighting for no reason
And if you can’t stop
find help
start over
set your sight
and reach your goals.
I write this to you in the middle of the night>
I am alone, of course.
I write this to you while sitting in a chair in front of a small desk in a small and mainly empty and almost vacant apartment.
No one to come home to.
No one to speak with.
No one to ask me for anything.
There is no one to complain.
There are no fights here.
Just silence.
There is no one to argue about who needs to do the dishes in the sink.
No yells at me about toilet paper or the direction I place the toilet paper roll on the toilet paper handle
No one to clean up for or dress up for.
I can be a bum or neat or not here.
There is no one to cook for and thus, I have no one else to be responsible for, which some might read this and call it freedom.
Or as the writer and poet Charles Bukowski regarded his similarity, is it freedom . . . or loneliness?
Before we digress or before we lend ourselves to the sad and emptiness of lonesome features, I come here to you with an open heart.
I am bleeding before your eyes for you to witness a life unkempt and unlived and unloved.
There is no turning back. There are no real timeouts and nor is there a way to rewind the clock and regain things, like, say a birthday you disregarded or lost track of.
You can never unsay a goodbye that cracked the world and left a void that can never be rebuilt.
There are certain apologies that will never mend the fence and fix the broken parts of a fight that took place.
There is nothing, and I do mean this; there is nothing in the world more valuable than your time.
So do not waste it.
We waste too much time fighting.
Arguing.
Worrying
And we forget to live.
We forget that the music does not play all the time, and if we are not careful, we can miss the chance to dance beneath the Miami moon.
We waste time looking elsewhere to find what we have within, which is here, always, and this has always been right in front of us.
If I had a second or maybe this would be a third chance by now; I know that I would care for this differently.
We are wasteful by nature and often, of course, we find ourselves at the threshold of a great awakening and next, it’s too late to say I’m sorry.
It’s too late to go back
And, it’s too late to make a dream come true.
Please . . .
Do not let this be you.
Words hurt and their scars run deeper than any blade could ever cut us.
Do not run from your feelings.
Do not waste time on being right.
Care more about being happy
I saw a young woman yesterday. Her life is limited to a wheelchair and her wheelchair accessories.
She smiles at me and always shows excitement when I say hello.
She allowed me to give her a hug yesterday.
I had a tear in my eye when I walked away because she is far more beautiful than she understands
I am not as great or as capable of living as that young woman.
I wish I was.
Nevertheless, I implore you
Please do not let your fights gain speed and get away from you.
Please do not let your loved ones slip through your fingers.
Please.
I do not wish this on anyone –
To go home to no one
To hear nothing but silence when the come through the door
No, “I love you.”
No one to say goodnight to
No one to kiss . . .
No on to hold
And worse, no one to wake up next to and realize that despite our faults and all of our crazy bullshit in this world; it really is a lucky thing to wake up next to someone you love and be grateful for the rest of your life.
You have far more than you believe
Please
Don’t waste it
The Written Addiction 