Who I Am.

I’ve been wrestling with this topic, of late. It keeps me up at night, it bothers me in conversation with others as words become harder to find. It’s not that meaning has changed or I have changed more than we all do when given enough time to get lost within ourselves, although I suppose it’s not altogether different from that. I know that my questions and queries are not unique. I know that I am not unique. Just as I have lived and will die, an incalculable number just like me have also lived and also died. The fact that I spend a great deal of time thinking about it and wondering doesn’t make me special so much as it just ensures that I’m a poor dinner guest and not always the most charming conversationalist.

For all my life, there have only been two quirks of character to me that have gone unchanged. The first is my love for the living things in the world that you might miss or crush beneath a heel or treat as a common pestilence worthy of your disdain and utter disregard. One of my first memories, there are few left as the past becomes more distant and possessed of an alien haze, is that of pedaling a child’s bicycle down a blacktop track and stopping to pick up and hold in my hand a woolly bear caterpillar, watching its black and orange segmented body, feeling the bristles of its fuzz and fur and life. I remember looking at it as if it was the most beautiful thing in the world and then setting it in the grass far off from the road where it might’ve met the kind of terrible fate only a child could imagine. That moment clings to me. It cannot be shed. It does not fade. When I see insects better off in one place over another, I take them to that place if I can. I don’t know why, although I think it is because a great sadness would fall over me if I were to spend even a moment thinking of the fates that hover like ghosts at the sides of the blacktop road.

I have told friends and acquaintances with some frequency that my life has changed since becoming a writer and truly writing. It hasn’t changed me in any meaningful way in terms of accrued wealth or status, but it has changed the way I think about the world around me that exists almost as an afterthought as I find myself caught up in worlds that are not real and the friends I make there who are figments of shadows of memories, little paper figures that could blow away in the wind if I bothered to remember to let them. When I think of the living, whether bird, or dog, family or friend, I think of their birth, their life, and their death. It happens accidentally, idly, and while sometimes the deaths are violent, for the most part they are ordinary and human and profoundly sad. I’ll find my head twitching from time to time as I think of my new dog growing old and not being here anymore, of leaving her at a veterinarian’s office at some vague and distant point in time that a younger version of me might never conceptualize let alone bother to think about. And yet it’s there. My head will twitch as if I’m trying to shake away the feeling and the pain of a distant and freshly created inevitability from which there is no escape, and so the days go. As I’ve grown older and dedicated myself to writing and thinking about writing and then writing again, I’ve found myself living little lives and little deaths with a comical repetition as days have turned to years.

And it fits, I suppose. I live heartbroken for lives lost that have not yet ended and I think about the little boy on his bicycle who once held a caterpillar in the palm of his hand.

Because the only other part of me that is unchanged is the great sadness that lives within me, and that has only ever grown. It ebbs and flows from time to time, but it is always there. On a bad day I will find myself staring at a moth mistakenly covered in paint as it struggles to fly, struggles, and then doesn’t move any longer. And I’ll find that sadness in all of its depth and waves rising to meet me, thinking of something grounded that should’ve flown, living though that life was short. I spiral frequently playing out conversations that never happen, leading to lives that never happened, and then saying goodbye to either great pains or great joys that have never come to be. I look at my dog, my sweet girl, and I imagine her muzzle gone gray and then her spot on the couch left vacant. I see the things around me as trees and I’m sitting alone in a forest, watching the leaves fall in Autumn knowing there will not be a winter, a summer, a spring. And these things repeat themselves again and again, a quiet tune on the radio that cannot be altered or changed. This does not make me unique, we all have pains that follow us like mosquitos in the wetlands, it simply means that writing is more important every day so that I might give some importance to the lives that I’ve idly watched live and die when most have not been there at all.

And so I’m here. I listen to music that is much different from what I listened to as a child. I no longer worship the god I was told to worship as a child. There was a time where once I enjoyed talking about politics, but that has faded with the realization that the most passionate people are driven by demagoguery and fear. And it is a strange thing to see shifting principles, changing loyalties, as neighbors are pitted against neighbors and all are ushered by the television and the radio to fight. Fight in the dog pit. Bleed until the dirt beneath your feet is wet and clings to you as mud. I have no love for humanity. I see them as creatures of cruelty, greed, and violence. But it is one thing to see a termite as a problem in a wooden home as opposed to being a part of the colony and told which of your fellow insects are most vile, most hateful, most evil, and why they are all those things because they look different than you, love different than you, and speak different than you. It becomes tiring, being even on the outskirts of that conversation. I used to like talking about politics with family and friends, but now I prefer silence. There are those who will say that then they will come for me, each newly fashioned figment of terror, but the monsters always shift and change form, a constant ushering of sequels and remakes of films repeatedly played until the television screen goes black. We will all die, whether in the pit of mud or somewhere else. I haven’t the time or the interest in being pointed at every other person in my midst while someone screams a fresh new variation in my ear of a tired old ‘Why’.

People will say from time to time that I’m flippant, but I’m not. I just tired. Tired and sad.

The other day, two days ago now, I pulled off to the side of a road, an empty local interstate, and picked up a wooly bear caterpillar from the blacktop and the pebbles not far from the yellow center line. I carried him to a line of bushes and trees that rested a few hundred feet from the culvert and the oncoming traffic that wasn’t there. I set him on a branch low to the ground so that it might avoid the interest of songbirds at least for a little while and I walked back to the minivan feeling for a moment just a little bit lighter. And then I thought about it resting in the darkness, becoming a cocoon, becoming a tiger moth, flying in the summer breeze, and how it might one day rest on the floor of an empty home, accidentally covered in paint as it grew still and heavy, trying to go where it would never again be.

I still felt joy. I still for a moment felt what it was like to be the child on the bicycle, holding his impossible friend. That part of me has not changed, but neither has the great sadness that lives in constant storylines within me. It is a fair trade, I suppose. An equal balance. I live in constant ends that have not happened and are frequently not real, little pockets of reality where everything is known and inso being is also better braced for, better understood, and might hurt a little less at the arrival of their stark and unavoidable inevitability. But the pain and sadness is still there, it will always be there, both in the world that is and the world that isn’t. And yet even now, even as I grow old, there is still that somber child within me, pedaling along, seeing strange movement on the ground. Acknowledgment and awareness. Knowing that there is life around you and that life should be observed and its destruction avoided.

I grow old even though I am that boy, holding a caterpillar, then a cocoon, then a moth, then a clump of dried and hardened paint. A boy on a bicycle, seeing a thousand lives if one.

Carry it away though it will one day go.

The inevitability does not make the kindness of an idle action invalid.