into the great beyond

today's been one year, to the sunday afternoon, since i looked in that mirror for the very last time.

since i looked at that face for the very last time. the face i've got now is much different.

one year since i breathed with those heavy lungs. one year since i asked for permission to do what i love.

well, maybe i'm still asking now. but what i love is a little different.

i'm a sucker for people. families. love. i want everyone to be fascinated with everyone, all the time.

i want everyone to ride in everyone else's cars and crosscheck repertoire and sync up schedules and eat dinner out and cook dinner in and visit and talk and think and message and be living in each others' pockets. i want our modern society to contrive an anti-individualism where the passing mention of "family" isn't risible, isn't passé, isn't assumed for the purpose of being summarily discarded. i want vibrance to coalesce from coincidence and i want to be in the same place as my people, all the way, all the time.

i don't want a christmas commercial. i want what's so nearly tangible, under my fingertips, under my sternum, under my tongue.

they say it really is truer than you think, how anniversaries bite you. how time and its cycles bring news and reminders. and so it was. so i dreamed to disorientation and woke up transported from where i slept. so i tore down my ideas and discovered harsher ones underneath. so i broke, and broke, and broke.

i discovered my deeper disdain, for having a cobbled-together family of twenty-three-year-olds, following the rancid mediocrity and rampant distance of the city trip. i discovered how horribly hurt i have been, yet again, and again, and again. i discovered that i fear myself doomed to be a child, forever, the hole in the wall where my heart is buried spackled over because they said i had to be an adult, i had to move on, i had to learn to live with it and learn to live with being alone.

the hole is there, but i keep it open. i keep my chest primed to be torn apart again.

because that's the thing about me - i don't want to forget. i can't stand to forget. i need to carry every bit of meaning i've ever said or meant or heard or felt with me forever, because i have a memory and it's a good one. maybe it doesn't hold so many good ones-

no. hang that back. you're damn right it does.

how i was herded out of a teeming room unable to say a minute's hello to someone i'd missed for so long, and stood instead at the curb with someone else i miss every time i stand in the same room as him, being greeted by the cheek-hushing realization that his world was being paused for me, because my safety was of his current concern.

how i was schlepping for services at an elementary school at the end of the world, and ended up strutting across the stage for the very first time with an entire fullest orchestra applauding my entrance, because i'm good enough, because i'm better than good enough, because they were inspired to sit there for me.

how i was terrified of a postponed party because i didn't know if i could handle the attention and the effort and the complication, and discovered instead that it was just as i'd been reassured and everyone was content not just to gaze expectantly on its way to disinterestedly at me but to know each other in that moment of hours for me, for me, for me.

i'm desperate, at this time, to burrow out that hole and find folks there waiting for me, to look out for me, to hope for me, to dream for me.

to look out for me, certainly. but to hope and dream perhaps with me, instead.

i want everyone with me. i always want everyone with me.

and i must carry them with me. it's what i was born to do.

i do different work now, a dispatch with a litany of smaller problems to solve. i was exactly right in my prognosis: many tasks make a river through my mind, and these petty problems escape rumination. it's a healthy way to be. i get through the day by talking, talking, talking, and i do have the opportunity, in this repetitive frame, to iterate, if i so choose.

i'm here to help people. i find that there's not much more i could possibly be doing, for anyone i know.

so what could i be doing, for myself?

i could write these letters, these tacit pantomimes, to those i love who may never be able to know it. and i could convince myself, through memory's malleability, that they've been told, even still.

i could approach the idea of letting go, just a bit, in order that i might fling my arms to grasp at something new, just up ahead. it's not that i haven't a safety net. it's that no one can direct me where to step next, and declare just how enthusiastic they'll be to catch me when i fall.

not if, but when. there will be stumbles, ongoing. this much is assured, just like the workday's revolving wrinkles.

there might be more, for me. this might not be everything.

i've been told i'm quite special. i've been told i'm one in the world.

it leads one to conclude that breaking down is essential to building up; that i might be a little more ruthless, in my approach.

i have to do the things i'm after. i have to seize what i want to be mine.

and if i'm refused, it'll be because i was bold. it'll be because the person in the mirror is the one i'm consulting with, and all my choices are up to us to decide.