Broken

World, when life is wrong I turn to you. I bleed out my sorrows by way of ballpoint pen, and be it restorative, or simply theraputic, it provides me catharcys. And so again, today, I turn to you.

World, I don't know what is going on in my life right now, and I'm terrified. I don't know how I'm going to afford food tomorrow, nor where I will be sleeping come night fall. I don't know how I'm going to clean my stained uniform in time for work, or even if I'll manage to scrownge enough gas money to get there. They are small, almost trivial concerns compared to the larger questions of how to pay for medical care, and whether or not I will, indeed, actually be attending college in January, but there quantity, and there constantness, it's an overwhelming feeling that suffocates.

I write this to you world, not as a sorrowful outcry, not as a request for pity or for assistance. I write it to you because I know not what else to do with the words.

You see I am strong, or so I thought. But even the strongest of us can be broken. Though I have faced adversity in my life, at this moment I take perspective and realize that it was not until this moment that I knew what it was to truly hit bottom. Not a flicker of light do I see in the distance. My future is black. An abyss, a void, a ravenous demon of smoke. You might say it is an adventure, a possibilty, but without any sense of promise or certainty, I see only darkness. And as is ever-true with myself and my battle with the darkness, in it I feel nothing, not love, not hope; only sorrow and hatred remind me that I am of flesh. Even the strongest of us, I am learning, have our weaknesses. Even the evilest of tormenters can find love amongst their followers. Some times, even 18-year-old's just want to cry into our mother's arms and be told that it's okay.

Lately I am nomadic. Without rules, without affiliation, without responsibility to any but myself. It is, in many ways, all I ever wanted, and yet it is not what I realized. It is cold, and lonely, and empty. Moments of security are few and far between. Days are lost, nights are cold. I want more than anything to be in my own bed, in a space that was mine. I don't miss the screaming, or the cynacism, but I miss the comfort that can only be found in my beige carpet and my off white walls. I miss my family. I want it back.

Converging Paths

Lately I've keep having this dream. The cutest little blond girl in a bright sundress twirls and twirls in a field of green. She is half me, that is quite clear, but there are foreign features in her face- the half of a man I don't yet recognize. The combination of her takes the best pieces of the two, and makes them better somehow. She is infinite in spirit, and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. She calls out for me to join her. And I wake with the unshakeable feeling that she's waiting somewhere...

And so I wonder...

I remember growing up and dreaming of Italy. I bought travel books with tales of places near and far. I wrote lists upon lists of places I would see. I decided Copenhagen would be first. I envisioned countless adventures - on a Vespa at midnight in Paris, tanning on the beaches of the Mediterranean, climbing the Great Wall. Knowing everything and yet nothing about the world, I would find life, love, food, fun, beauty, art, architecture, spiritual root with the world, and pieces of myself I never even knew existed. I had been so sure for so long that this was what I wanted - to be out and alive. I've wanted it so bad it is a thirst that has never left my mouth, like that for water on a hot humid summer day.

My world was big. Vast, expansive, and to be explored. All my life, it has been the only form of the world I have known. So now that I find my world shrinking in around me, my desires that were once boundless, now find infinite comfort in the idea of an acres spaces with green grass, a white house, and a picket fence, I wonder: how do we know if we're settling, or if what we thought we wanted, just isn't really what we wanted? How do know when to stop looking for happiness? What if on the way to our life's journey, we stumble in to something wonderful - are we to abandon it and keep going? Is the line between following seredipity down a promising path and one of resentment really a line at all? Or are our choices really OUR choices, to be deteremined and later passed or failed with whatever judgement we wish to pass upon them?

And how do I become this new person I want to be without giving up the person I thought I was?