meanderings

Finally, the world seems right again, the balance restored, the stars aligned, the zen…zenned. I have a new computer, another one that sits on my lap, but this one works, this one lets me type the letters b and n, and use the space bar so that I don’t have to type like this:

hi.how.are.you.today.

So anyway. I can write again. I can breathe, maybe it will help me sleep at night again. Although I guess I could have been writing long-hand, but then I can’t read it, and then it is lost forever with all the other scribble words I have penned over the years, all to be forgotten, most of them letters to girls that sit crumpled in my desk drawer. Poor penmanship may be a curse in that case.

I have learned to cope with my decision to not go to Law School, to not have the next three years of my life planned out, and then my future laid before me with smiling faces, fences for kids in yards to play, and a paycheck that comes every other week, always the same, always direct deposit, always seeing the dentist every six months.

I still try and hide my fear and anxiety over the uncertainty that writing may or may not bring with different things. Girls, alcohol, basketball, work…it’s easy to lose yourself for a short time, to let yourself go, rid your mind of the thoughts and desires that have pushed you to do what you want to do, and to float along, merely existing, like an amoeba, changing shape and size with the situation, never truly being though. Just a single cell, your heart, pumping to keep the blood flowing and the oxygen coming.

Someone got fired at work for drinking on the job. I guess I will stop now. The cranberry cosmopolitan is a great drink. Not to strong, not to light, but easily disguised as regular juice when kept in a white to-go cup. I keep it in the back of the restaurant, on top of the ice-tea machine, and take a sip every now and then, until my head gets heavy, my eyes a little wider, and the hunger pains in my stomach due to serving people delicious food all day or night while trying to maintain on a single peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I had when I woke up at one.

It feels good to write again.

To sit here with my fingers lightly set on top of the black keys. I don’t have to think about that girl that I should call, the one I shouldn’t, and the one who wants me too. I don’t have to think about, or remember, or feel the frustration from the seemingly endless runaround people have to go through in order to meet that person that one day you might end up with, on a beach, in Fiji, suspended over the blue water in a hut made of bamboo, looking out at the ocean, the waves, the sun setting on top of the horizon, thinking only about now, about her smell, her skin, her smile. It must take a miracle, that’s what I have decided. Relationships that work are miracles. I don’t know how many miracles one can expect to be a part of in one’s life. I have already been a recipient of two or three off hand. The electric shocks forced my heart to begin pumping again when I was seven. Maybe that was the big one, all the others will be small and unnoticable from here on out perhaps. I didn’t burn the house down today when I tried to “cook” pancakes and eggs. I forgot to grease both pans. It was all lost, all in the garbage. Maybe I can trade in all the small miracles for a big one. Let the house burn, the car crash the next time I drive home under the influence of funny tasting liquids…all for what?

It feels good to write. It helps me to forget how it feels when the man asks me to marry him, when he tells me that he makes a lot of money, that he can take care of whatever I need, that he is great in bed, it helps me to forget how I want to take the wine-key from my pocket and jab in his neck, blood spurting from his severed artery, his friends, who are decent, who don’t touch me, who don’t hit on me every time I walk near them, who don’t stop their conversations when I approach the table so that they dream of all the things they would do to me like he does, gasp in horror. But in the end they would understand. They would cry during the eulogy, but on the way home, in the secret, in the enclosed confessional of their cars, hands intertwined with their life partner across the seat, they would know he went to far, they would know he had it coming. My blue eyes can only handle so much before they see red.

It feels good to finally get it all out.

She moved to New York without saying goodbye. The one who dissapeared. She left. Packed up, I assume, and moved in with her friend in the big busy city. Her debt and her problems are still here I am sure. But if she can’t see them, if she can’t hear the knocks at her door, the cold water from her shower head, she doesn’t know they exist. Everything is so wrong, everything is so no right, everything within me and without me pleads to forget about her, to realize that it is a good thing that she is gone…because she is too much like me.

It is so hot outside I wonder if I am justified sitting in my house all day. I wonder if my body will forgo the terrible feeling it usually has when it does nothing all day, if it will allow me this one day? The humidity is suffocating. It feels like nature is winning. Like the Earth finally is ridding itself of the cancerous creatures that inhabit, destroy, and take for granted her beautiful…

Like the jolly bartender said last night as he gave me and my friend another round of funny liquid, cheers. Cheers to you ol’ earth, you are winning, and I salute you. I am happy for you and Al Gore, it has taken a miracle or two, but you are finally holding hands, enjoying the now, wondering when the rest of the world will realize how right you two are. The world is getting hotter.

And I will submit to you today. I will take my round basketball and dare to challenge your blazing smile, all for the sake of a tan line.

~ by kevinthomas on August 2, 2006.