Soma

"I'm all by myself

as i've always been

i'll betray myself,

to anyone, lost, anyone but you."

Time keeps on crawling towards me, and i keep on shoving my mind into a box of puzzles to avoid it.

Not even avoid it. It's not a refusal to acknowledge the entropy, the gradually inevitable dimming of the star, the decay of this once vibrant bright powerful thing that i was.

It's just that engaging with that reality brings me nowhere.

It does not bring me joy, or new forms of enlightenment. It does not resolve the puzzle in a novel way, it does not create some ephemeral moment that will help me transcend the soulful sadness that is the decline.

Not even just the decline. I have always felt this soulful sadness. It has been my worn weary traveling companion since i can begin to remember myself. As a boy, rejected by his peers, as a young man, briefly spellbinding and star lit before alienating everyone once again, and again as a man, alone in small rooms while those i imagined as my friends went to name brand university's and i went to community college out of sheer desperate to answer the question,

"what can i do to survive for the rest of this life alone?"

I never got the answer i wanted. I wanted to find something i was good enough at to be able to live and die alone, as was prophesied for all those who are truly strange, autistic, poor, disabled AND gifted. Ruined and luminous.

The answer i got was that i CAN'T survive alone. Never could really. I could handle the mental strain, the loneliness, but i couldn't endure the mask, the grind, the lying, the suppression, the things one has to do to work a job with normal people with the majority of your free time. I tried my heart out, never knowing why i was failing, always formulating an idea and trying again, only to fail in a similar way, with just enough things changed that i thought it was a new problem.

The problem was always me. I was always too different to be in the world, and i tried. i really tried at everything. I even tried to die, several times, but doctors brought me back. The world brought me back. A undiscovered compartment in my heart opened up, hardened the exterior and made a declaration.

"You will not let them win. You will not pack up your shit and leave. You will be incompressible. You will remain a monument to yourself, for yourself, and fuck everyone else."

That is how i lived for many many many years. I sometimes still feel that i live that way now. That my safe place is self belief, in a world full of people that never believed in me.

Suicidal ideation they call it. Disassociation sometimes. Mine usually took the form of fantasizing about dying. Falling off a cliff. Being hit by a car. Being caught in a cross fire. Rarely did i think enough about it to make a plan, and when i did i knew that i needed to do something.

Nothing ever really helped though. Not meds, not talk therapy, not joy.

I always felt like a burden to those around me, and embarrassed at my inability to weather the mundane world of work the way everyone else could.

I had thought of myself as this tough, unkillable warrior motherfucker. I beat death, I fought back against overwhelming odds as a person and in my real life. I fought bullies with superior numbers, i fought the system that wanted to see me die. I always won. Eventually. And i always had the stamina to drag myself for the long starving months it took to get from the fallow times to the finish line.

I could OUTLAST everyone else.

Like a cockroach. Living in the trash and dim light, Skittering on the margins of society in my dead mans clothes with unshakable wide shoulders. The power of my mind to buoy my frail body.

IN HERE I AM STRONG.

IN HERE I AM WORTHWHILE.

IN HERE I AM INDESTRUCTIBLE.

Out there, i was a bum, unable to work, unable to earn, unable to get a job with 3 degrees from my shitty community college education. Unable to be normal, unable to talk to girls unless they talked to me first, like everything, pinned down and passive, waiting for others to validate me before trying to do anything at all.

I was a shitty vocalist in high school. But i sang in a band and had fun, and we were pretty good. I was probably a shitty poet to. But i read in quiet moldy rooms of people much older than me and was encouraged, congratulated, and told i had a gift. Told i was worthwhile. Told to keep writing.

It never made me any money. I could never do it to support myself. I was never going to be famous or known. That was my gift. The gift of knowing that i could not keep myself afloat, but beneath a hail of arrows, i could keep walking, no matter what.

And i did keep writing. Maybe not in the way i was supposed to. Maybe not in a way that could make me money. But at least in a way that keeps the legend of that once great warrior alive in my mind, for me to remember when i am looking down from a bridge as a walk to think,

"Not today. I have too much left in me to say."