Written 5/29/14 for Neighborhood Watch, local podcast
So I was asked to write a thing for this thing, but the thing is, I haven't written in a while because
it takes feeling and emotion for me to write and I haven't felt in so long. I've found each waking
moment is filled with an emptiness that frightens me. Each motion I go through is void of
emotion. Every tear I shed has no reason. And when I meet smiling faces in the hallway, part of
me just wants to walk past them with my chin resting on my chest.
But it’s easier to meet them with a smile. And that’s why you don’t know.
You don’t know that every now and then, when I'm pensive, I take a solitary midnight bike ride
to a parking lot with street lamps burnt out like me. Sometimes the asphalt hurts to sit
on. Sometime a drunk stumbles across. But here, no one sees me. No different than during the
day anyway, and it's how I like it too. No one is around to hear my attempts to feel, my dry sobs
and my desperate pleadings with God.
But there's another façade, that I don't need Him and that I don’t need you. In reality, I wouldn't
mind if someone sat with me and listened. Not necessarily just to me. I wouldn't mind if
someone sat and listened to the rustling of the summer wind through the leaves of the trees above
me, above us, unchained from time and obligations. There is a beauty in silence and in removing
yourself from the world.
In that silence, I wouldn't mind if you asked me how I was and waited on me until I told you how
far I am from "doing good." I wish you'd do that instead of run off with your studies, your pills,
your work, or your lovers. Maybe you'd know how much I am also struggling if you stayed up
with me a while.
They say that man is not meant to be alone. But here I am, in the middle of an empty lot. Even
the drunk has his alcohol to warm his heart. And I'm just shivering from the cold in
mine. Shivering from the suppressed emotions of my present. And I'm afraid I've forgotten
how to release them, because writing was how I did that.
And now you’re reading this. I'm afraid they'll only get worse…my lack of words, my emptiness.
So I’m here again, on a midnight bike ride, shivering, pleading, writing, waiting in a parking lot
with street lamps burnt out like me, trying to figure out how to light up again.
