What have I done with my life. Burning through it. Harder than ever before. Is it passion? Is it escapism? Am I avoiding all the things I’ve built up in the last years? To go from ever present, ever caring father, to exhausted and diligent company man? I think of it and feel nothing, only the drive to push harder. It gives me perspective. No that’s not quite right. It gives me value? Sure but to whom? Turning 45 this year. Halfway mark at best. This life lived so far, has it been very long? At 12 it seemed like forever. The last 12 have seemed like a blip. My father warns me on the one hand, don’t work so hard, you don’t want to miss out. A month later he scolds me for not answering his texts within 15 minutes.

To be continued, conjured up from the previous attempt, the last try never being the last, a resuscitation, a recitation, a mantra, a belief, a prayer.

I asked io if she believed in God and when she said yes, I asked why. Mz was livid, said later, why put that in her mind?

Because I am full of it. I am full of the yearning for doubt. I have no doubt in my mind that the terror I feel in the night before I pass out exhausted is that this is it. The be all end all end game and my options have run out.

The new worry: I can never go to school again, I can never fall in love in again, I can never be new again. Even worse: australia will never happen for instance. Sky diving will never happen, living abroad will never happen. What I have seen and where I have gone amounts to 90% of what I will see and do in this life. This life, as if another. I will see and do in life. My life. Period. End stop. End all.

How nice for something else, for something more. For religion, for science fiction, for fantasy. For magic. There’s so much of it around us, and yet, and yet.

No, this is it. End all. Full stop.

Later, night. Almost there. For a brief moment. The singular. The alone. The only. What peace. What worth do I really have at this point? Manhattan’s a mad house, a fun house, batches of people who desperately want to lose their minds in patches of darkness and stone. Only this. All the time.

Silence, break it. Ha. It escapes me, the potency of it is there and but no longer waiting. Leaving me. You’ve all left me. All my old lovers are now old. Even the despair, even his death, old and thin and  emaciated. Worn through, see through, abandoned. Yes, abandoned but not condemned.

He said this to me, remember this. It’s all habit, all of it, everything you think you are, it’s just a memory, muscle memory of what you should do, how to be.

And I think he’s right. I think how as I move I am thinking of my mother, how she would sort of the dishes, how she would open a kitchen cabinet while stirring a pot, how she would wipe her brow with her while on her hands and knees scrubbing.

And I think of how he spoke, always a smile on lips that whispered violence. They way he held my hand and graced my cheek with the other. How he lied, staring into my eyes, how I lie staring yours.

So long, so so long.

He holds it close to himself, this idea of himself, this bleeding maw of himself. This thing that once was, the who he had been. And what now? What’s left now? A husk?

Nononononono

So much more than that. It’s all trivial. He’s come to realize it’s all trivial, even the children, the woman, the mother, the father. He walks through the night, empty streets of suburban arrogance, it’s all so trivial. Only the air, the silence that is not silence, that is empty of them and their jostling, only the air matters. Because you need to live. You need it to feel alive. He laughs. He sounds so stupid. He walks through empty streets and relishes every step forward where another living person doesn’t cross his path. It’s so easy to disappear. It calls to him. Like it did to this father before. And perhaps before him as well. Being present doesn’t necessarily guarantee presence. The being there, the being wholly and relentless there.

Nononononono

Being there but nowhere to be found. To  be looked at and not seen because you’re a figment of their imagination. You said it didn’t you? At best, you said, at best we’re an impersonation of ourselves. At best, you said. At fucking best. How have you not lost your mind?