Grow and Edit

This isn’t going to be about the kind of stuff you think it will. Or maybe it will. In that case, congratulations. You know me better than I know myself and you win a pair of socks.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about life, death, and all the things that make life so wondrous but also so terribly hard. Now it could be somewhat accurately said that this isn’t anything new and I tend to do this quite a lot, I wouldn’t be the one to attempt to deny that as I think you’re supposed to use lawyers for that kind of thing, but that’s about where we stand on the general day-to-day. To put it lightly, it’s not always particularly easy living in my head. I hope there’s no one else up there because I tell you what, it’d be like buying a new home and then realizing there’s a giant hole in the roof and suddenly it’s hailing. It’d be like buying a car and realizing on the way home there there’s no frame, that you’re rolling home sideways in what is essentially a giant aluminum ball.

It would be sitting alone almost every night of the week and wondering if you missed an exit sign so clearly marked that everyone saw it but you.

I don’t pretend to be ordinary and I really don’t try to be out of said ordinary. This isn’t high school and I’m not attempting to join a club occupied only by me. According to the Squarespace stats, almost no one reads these things so it’s gone on to take the form of a rather therapeutic friend that I can just talk at and he’ll never think poorly of me. Is he responsive? No. This friend appears to be in a bit of a vegetative state. But I’m sure he was loved by his family before getting plugged into the wall for the rest of his life. Rest easy, big guy. Go to sleep and listen to all the problems the whispers in my head swear exist. Judging by the amount of time I get lost in places I don’t recognize, there seem to be plenty.

Over the past couple years I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I don’t process things the same way everyone else does. A lot of times I do and sometimes I’m able to sit back and smile and breathe a little easier because thank god. I’m not insane. But other times, times when I’ve stood in the middle of my apartment at two in the morning for almost thirty minutes because I thought I heard something breathing, times when I was almost late for work because I was staring so long at my reflection and was certain it wasn’t the same person staring back, times when I broke apart my bed with a baseball bat and slept on a recliner for almost six months because that wasn’t my bed anymore. .. It’s hard to look at yourself the same way after that. And what’s funny is, in the moment, in each and every one of those instances that seemed to last forever, it never once occurred to me that what I was doing wasn’t normal. I never once thought “Geez, Luke. Know what sounds nice? Not doing this really weird thing.”

It just didn’t occur to me until about a year ago when I looked back and wondered what exactly I was on about. To be honest, I still don’t know. I have no idea why the sound of the night scared me so bad that I was hyperventilating, or why I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I didn’t know why I heard someone knocking on my window in the middle of the night even though I live on the second floor of a fairly sizable complex. I just knew that those things were happening and I didn’t know why. Now, freshly turned 30 and still just as lonely as all years prior to this one, I wonder if I just wanted company. Even if it was the delusions that ran rampant in the quiet of my head, maybe I just wanted something going on up there so I wasn’t watching days pass by to the sound of white noise. Or maybe I’m a neurotic weirdo who’s spent so long wishing he was in worlds that don’t exist that I’m having a hard time processing the one that I actually live in.

Maybe it’s better to be afraid of the things that could be rather than believe with all your heart that there’s nothing there.

This probably all sounds a bit dire but I don’t mean it to. I’m probably just a bit odd and that’s okay. If the worst that can be said of me is “Wow. That guy is pretty weird. Let’s not be around him.”, then all told- it could be worse. Plus, there’s an upside: I’m decent at editing my own work. I’ve gotten to a point where I can look back at stories I’ve written in the past and realize they’re terrible or flawed and take mental notes so I don’t make those errors again. While that may be a writing thing, I’m happy to say that I’ve also grown as a person enough to look back at who I’ve been and think “No, Luke. That’s weird.” Oddly enough, that makes me feel better. Even though I still hear things that aren’t there and feel like someone’s walking right behind me when they aren’t, it’s nice to be able to look back at the life I’ve lived and realize that I can tinker with the more irritably weird parts until they’re more “appropriately strange”. That’s what I strive for anyway. I’m not too good at being normal. There are too many strange things in the world for me to ever want to be something like that.

Then again, I’d like to be exceptionally odd if I have to not be normal of the sort that exists everywhere around me in this little city I call home-for-now. I want to be the weirdo with a time machine or an airship. Or maybe someone who can open holes in reality and step through to somewhere…more. I want to meet people so incredible that they can’t possibly be real in coffee shops that don’t exist. I want to fall in love even though I don’t know what love really looks like. I want to travel to distant lands so very far away that they might just be another space, another time, or another world.

I want to be more than a weird guy in a hat who’s often alone and sometimes afraid of the dark. But maybe that’s all I am. Maybe that’s all I’ll ever be.

Then again, give me a year and I’ll be able to edit that too.