10.10.10

we start with 1979

I am sweating like the time I did right before my first swimming tournament, it was very early in the morning and the entire bed felt wet and my body was damp and icky with sweat but I dared not to move, lest I awoke the entire dorm, who would be suspicious to find a profusely sweating teen, who with all his strength tried to lull himself into sleep, but was awake with a certain paranoia, it wasn’t that the thrill of competition that scared me, we were definitely going to lose, unless one of the other teams found themselves stalled en route to the location, and it wasn’t the self-consciousness of having to stand and display myself in ill-fitting trunks, which during that time showcased more than any casual observer would have desired to see, it was an implacable feeling which in all rational sense, had no place to exist, yet there I was, sweating in my bad and painfully alert, like I was during this particular day, when I was about to meet an old friend.

You would like to care, you really would like to care, and have spent your entire life as a caregiver willing yourself to genuinely care, but try as you might, you don’t, there is a part of your psychology and person that truly does not give a damn, and the sooner we both acknowledge this and put it out in the open, the easier it will be for both of us to move on. This would be the exact words, strung together into sentences I would utter with the right amount of confidence, and humility, there are some of my personal talents that I continually doubt, and others that I fake then claim for praise, but to my own eyes at least, I was born to act, not in plays, theatre or film, but in the stage and monotony of the everyday, I could affect the mannerisms and simply coax you into a thought, although it is rare that I mean actual harm, often the case is that I have simply lost the enthusiasm for people, and society in general, that its best I distance myself from anything that may resemble or grow into affection, it is shocking to me that my inherent laziness to play the game, as some might call it, has inspired such convoluted behavior.

This friend belonged to a different era, as I find myself changing to the winds, with little to anchor my weight against the waves of time, except of course my perfect indifference, which adapts and shapeshifts and hides behind many noble or unworthy things, as yet having met this friend, reverted me immediately into an old persona, someone who was cowardly, had few words to say, yet, held a powerful, crushing and strenuously felt existence to his own self. Friend is a misleading misnomer, because that is not what you name someone you haven’t seen for nearly a decade, and yet, it would be simpler to keep things this way, let the bigger details float and remain in their hyperbolic forms, we’re here to nail down the specifics.

I have found myself used to the tedium of loneliness, sometimes this feels like being in a room without its walls or floors, where you lay chained to the self-awareness of a universe deliberately emptied, but once in a while, perhaps very rarely, an outsider may appear, and against your very wishes, prove to be a friend. And this is how my adventure began, how I began to pilot a retrospective look into things I once preferred left, there will be many things I want to share as a writer, but today we begin with this meeting with an old friend, how this began to shape the days forward, and put my very nature to be accepting of a self-induced invincibility, a half-existence, and felt the need to create a voice, and try curating a mark on the landscape of US.

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