First, here's what happened to me (short and bittersweet... ok, so maybe not so short):First time - just starting high school, it was true love, it was perfect, it was everything, and then, it was gone...
she could not handle peer and family pressure... her best friend, also mine beside her, was in love with me... her family said she was too young to be as seriously in a relationship as she was... after a year of bliss, two butterflies in a hurricane of emotion, two rebels laughing in the face of all... they got to her... she broke down, went catatonic for a few days, then zombied her way through the next year... after six months I ran away to join the army just to get away from NYC and seeing her zombieness (and my own) and being expected to pretend evertything was alright with our little group... no more lies...
The first week I never left my room... no food, maybe water, I don't recall... I sat in my closet and peed on myself rather than get up and walk to the bathroom... I called her several times a day but her parents would not let the calls through... everything else, I ignored... I died so hard I was too apathetic/numb to lift a finger to actually kill myself... probably because I hoped she'd find the strength to change her mind in spite of the peer and parental pressures... without her, nothing else mattered...
I finally went back to school after our mutual friends called every hour to coax me out to talk to her (she'd gone back to school after a week)...
she avoided eye contact... she said I should be with her best friend (who was my closest friend too besides her)... she said that was final... she walked away zombie-style... I could barely make her out through my tears...
then followed six months of numbness where I did whatever she asked and was her best friend's boyfriend... I decided the army was my way to get away... the great escape...
I took every drug the army had to offer... drank anytime I was not on duty... the army only lasted a year and a half... I wrote to her every day... all the time... I got out and went back to NYC and found her broken, no spirit, just a normal human going through the motions of lfe without the energy that made her who she was...
I spent the next four years drinking and drugging and wandering anywhere... always writing to her... hoping she'd wake up... I finally gave into family pressures and feigned giving up trying to die passively... I took a job... that was death of the spirit, much worse than death of the body for me... I drank nightly, smoked dope and rode a motorcycle year round (still in NYC), took the bike down on ice a few times, missed going under a car by less than a foot once... I lived as walking dead person... life was meaningless, just a faint hope that she was still alive somewhere inside and might choose to reach out and need me someday was all that kept me alive... maybe it still is...
after almost three years of this I looked around and decided that people at work needed me... retarded teenagers looked to me as their parent, their leader, their savior, their god... I worked in an institution for mentally retarded wards of the state... I saw their progress and felt an obligation to wake up more, to stay alive for them... I went to work almost straight sometimes, though still drinking and smoking for the last few hours of work (after the kids were put to bed) and then, at the bars each night...
but I started hearing music again... music was life for me...
then John Lennon was shot... I was driving home from work... I almost sobered up... it woke me up for a few hours... then Bob Marley died... music was dying... then... Harry Chapin died... they were heros... gun, cancer, car, humanity was even more suicidal than I was... this body remained alive somehow - 90% on the hope for true love to truly be forever, on the hope she'd come back to me... 10% for the kids at work... I still wrote daily to her...
I decided that this girl at work who was interested in me would make a good roommate and went through the motions of courtship ritual - after making it clear to her that she could never have my heart and the core of me for I belonged to another... the first... we spent eight years together living a suburban couple's life... I returned to school to get my degree because it pleased her... I became a professional... management in the field of caring for the discarded mentally retarded population... I made a shitload of money in the stock market...
eight years of coupledom... every month or so I'd wake up a little and tell my roommate, my best friend, my partner, that I wanted out... but the only out I wanted was the girl who left, the first true love... so I stayed in NYC writing letters to her, the first, and hoped to find her again... the grapevine told me she got married... I finally decided it was time to leave NYC and explore myself... maybe be reborn... the other half of the couple life I was living did not want to leave NYC, so we bought a house together in Florida and she'd visit and I'd live there...
I did not work, living on savings, for the next five years... the twentieth anniversary of the night the world, for me, ended came and I blared Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band along with tons of other music... I still wrote her often, but also wrote to other people... I made new friends and tried to let go of the dream she'd become and let my heart fall in love again... each night I went out dancing until dawn... I started running miles a day again to get back into shape... I convinced myself that I could have a second chance at love, that there are more than one soulmate in this universe for each of us and my other soulmate was looking for me all that time I was wallowing in the loss of the first...
so it was twenty years, but I fell in love again... or at least I trusted someone with all I could find inside and in her arms I let go, deep inside her I cried myself into a puddle over the first love lost and every inhuman cruelty I observed or experienced in life... I was ready to take a chance again...
she left a few months later... but I was still alive and hopeful and I had another best friend again, someone who listened to and responded to everything, and suddenly she was in love with me (she said) and another opportunity to live my dream of being in love and sharing life rose... she knew all about the part of me that would never belong to anyone but the first... she wanted me because of that too, she said...
So came the second time - she had four kids... they called me daddy, or dad, or parent (each age had a different concept of a new adult role model in the house)... I left a house in Florida with the best friend who bought it with me and lots of bills and any sense of responsibility... I put whatever could fit into a 28 foot truck into storage (where it remains to this day), mostly music and books, but also every memory of the first love, and drove to Toronto and spent my last dime of credit setting up a happy home for them... it was bliss for a while... bumpy at times, but my dream had come true... I was with a soulmate and had a family and loved life again... after twenty two years, I was reborn...
Canada did not let me stay... it sounds almost laughable, but it destroyed us... I was deemed an illegal alien after almost two years and told to leave the country... they would not let me back in... and she was afraid to come to the states because of her past relationship in the states... I borrowed many thousands and sent it all to her... I wallowed, I worked 100+ hours a week and sent it all to her... maybe she was just using me all along...
I stayed in Buffalo/Niagara Falls because it was the closest I could get to them... finally she said she found someone else and I rolled over and died again... trust betrayed... I lived on the street... people handed me food and coins... wanting to die is not enough... having the will to die is not enough... I had no will to do anything, again... I was dragged into a shelter a few times (it gets cold in winter)...
the body did not die... I had no will to do anything about that... or maybe I cared about how the kids would react to hearing about my death, if they ever did... or maybe I did not want the first love, now almost thirty years gone, to have any justification for leaving me (even though it was against most of her will, I still tell myself) and my being 'sick in the head' would negate all the true love that was meant to be for us... killing myself would make me not worthy of her love...
I finally gave up my last shred to self-respect and, with money they sent to me, got on a bus and went to stay with people who adopted me as a young child... the people who always told me I was no good and would amount to nothing and was Hitler and evil and... a month later, they threw me out again...
I don't remember (or perhaps I don't want to remember) everything... this was, after all, supposed to be short and... whatever... I want the story to end with me finding the ultimate soulmate, be she the first or second or third, because that is what this life is about in most of my simple personal belief system... and I have been through so much, invested so much, everything, I do not want it all to be wasted, to end in ultimate failure...
so I tell myself... so I write about it... I write, elsewhere, from the heart that still dreams of finding the perfect love, the soulmate who will love everything in me, including the fist soulmate and the second and every stupid mistake I made along the way and every foolish hope and dream I've ever known... that writing is an addiction, perhaps the one thing that keeps me from actually doing something about the feeling that life is too cruel to continue...
and I write, also elsewhere, from the superficial daily observation of my immediate environment, probably to keep myself grounded in some form of physical world illusion so that in case the one comes along, I'll hopefully know it...
and I write in many elswheres... whatever part of me that still lives, still lives in words...
and that is the story, love, the story of a life as told by love... a life still hoping to become a love song...
.
. .
. . .
(and every good song deserves a coda)there is a child inside of me who understood, from the beginning, that this life is a lonely experience because we are in separate shells... this child inside has been enjoying living in the moment since I can remember first conscious thoughts passing through my brain... through adoptions, rejections by families and soulmates and friends, through depression and apathy and suicidal numbness, through the motions of survival, through everything - this child would wake up most every day and laugh at something, most often, at me for playing the game of emotional hunger and dependency and need... but it feels so good when the need is fulfilled, it almost seems worth it...
maybe this body is still alive because of this child inside (hope?)... or maybe it is because I do not see the odds in walking away from the game on my own... whatever comes after this life, if anything, the game I want to win is played in this life as far as I know and I'm still a loser, ultimately, and I want to win cuz winning is more fun... so I wander through each moment, sometimes a dead-zombie going through the motions of minimal survival and sometimes the child who loves everything because loving everything is the best feeling I've got... living, waiting...
"waiting... he laughs at the concept... and then, suddenly, he stares through the fearful thought that he may be waiting too... like that guy in Waiting For Godot... wondering when the waiting will be over, and what will happen then, living?... is there a point?... I hope so... he laughs at the folly of hope, of waiting, of wondering... and kisses your cheek." ~ the childinside
for whatever this is worth, for whatever this means, in spite of the many potentially meaningful details left out, it is at least from one seriously grounded perspective, the story of a life, a life I loosely call mine...
maybe I wrote this today because I think you might understand the devotion to love and soulmates and the loss and the madness it can become... or maybe I wrote this because I want you - someone - to understand so I don't feel as alone... or maybe I wrote this to give you something to do that might delay you from finding a gun and rope and blowing your head off while hanging yourself...
anyway, I appreciate your emailing me... I appreciate your writing and your perspectives and the being I know as you... and I wanted you to know this...
and that too...
share, care, be well, be aware (as well as you are able)...
till tomorrow (from the song by Don McLean of the same name),
honest love, me