Rolling out of bed I can taste the last weeks worth of late nights and pollution washing around in my mouth under the guise of bad breath. No clue how i got to bed or where my clothes are, at least the body next to me has retained hers. Hoisting myself out of bed like some delapidated junker being swung into a crusher i head for the closet. Luckily I have a clean pair of jeans without any conspisuous holes in difficult places, because i have no clean boxers to pair them with. Door, cat, 20 feet of stumbling bleary eyed landscape and I’m staring down my not-so-pretty-anymore reflection. The torrential halo of hair surrounding my face in the bathroom mirror says i took a shower befor i went to sleep, whenever that was. My last concious memories are from around 2 am: 4 hours earlier. Showering no longer an issue, I attempt to get my body covered and make it to work on time. At times I can be considered a haphazard dresser. My lack of fondness for subtlety in hues and my current inability to keep my eyes open seem to making for one of those mornings. I wind up with a soccer jersey, blue jeans, and a hoodie. grabbing a baseball hat to cover my mane, I’m off.
In my rearview i’m watching the Southern California sun come up in that color of red reserved for LA and dragon’s breath. I can’t help but stare. I’m never really sure why i have this longing to be in the city. It’s dirty, torrid, crowded, and dangerous in places, but for all these things whenever I am here I am so infused with feelings; excitement, happiness, maybe even peace, that it’s hard for me to leave. Perhaps it is because it is the place I associate with the few escapes i have from my real life, the movies, the tv shows, the fake emotions we fill our hearts up with while no one is watching us so we can make it through the days. For so many of us that is what life becomees… the unpleasant parts between the distractions where we can bury our heads in a darker place; a bottle, someone else’s life, a pill capsule, eventually a gun barrel.
I love the city, but it is such a wake up call. Ice cold bucket of water in the face, courtesy of everyone living their lives instead of hiding like a recluse where they can control how much of life actually gets let in. like the migraine hypochondriac, bound by walls and black curtains, I’m waiting for the wrong breath of air to open a crack to the light again. Yes, yes, there are so many different types of hiding; defense mechanisms; so who am i to say that what I am doing is worse. I am I. I get to judge myself, and I am found lacking. People walk the streets of LA everyday, not knowing a soul they pass by, not caring one iota about the people they work with, just waiting to get back to their comfort zones. I am not the only person hiding from the world, I simply feel more seperate than most because of my distance from similarly damaged people.
I’ve spent the time between tasks at work rereading and rediscovering the preceding written year of my life. So much paper and soooo many bits with ’2004′ as their label. They deserve to be here, alongside the rest of my chronicles, but they are mine alone. That year was the source of more excruciating joy and loving sorrow than any other period I can recall with clarity from my life. The words pale in comparison to the feelings and experiences. Cheap reproductions like hastily produced copies from a press losing ink. But they remind me, they elicit the thoughts and emotions of that period. Perhaps I am afraid; afraid that if others read them, they won’t understand. They can’t understand because they were not there. They can pretend, like we are all so good and clever at doing, they can tell me how they feel it and what it means to them, while their poor attempt at translating my silly words will leech the vigor from my memories. If they can tap into them with their weak interpretations, maybe it will cheapen the entire thing. So they remain mine, and mine alone, only to be shared with the people who were there initially. Those who saw the crash sites and tasted the victory toasts, to whom I will forever be indebted for helping or hurting me with such intensity.
