The Glorious Wreck.

It’s surprising how easy it can be to lose yourself. At 26 years old now, I’m finding it hard to get a clear picture of myself at 15, at 19, 21, 23. I’ve lost myself, you see. And so I figured the best way to find myself would be to look back and figure out where I was headed back then. What were the motivations? Where was I going? What have I learned over the past decade? And how the fuck did I end up spending the past 5 years sleeping on a half-eaten olive drab couch in the basement of a house I can’t afford?

I suppose, for the uninitiated, a brief re-cap is in order. At 21 years of age, I saw the birth of my one and only child through a pair of gushing eyes. I watched as the nurse carried her to a plastic tub and gave her the once over. For the first time, I saw a placenta, in radioactive shades of purple and blue, splash on to a section of tiled floor I was occupying just an hour earlier. I saw the hands, feet, nose, and chest of the little girl I’d been waiting months to meet. I clumsily snipped away at an umbilical cord at the good doctor’s request and counted the first of my parenting failures when he finished the job.

Ever since that late-evening, everything has been a blur. And not in that romantic, parenting-is-beautiful way. I mean, it’s honestly been a blur. I try to remember specific things. Try to get my brain to focus on an event. Something to get a hold of. But it ends, always, in frustration. Like trying to re-live, just for a moment, the joy of riding bikes with your best elementary-school friend or trying to hear your favorite song again for the first time. You come close. You can almost feel it. You stretch and focus and concentrate all your will on a brief voyage back in time only to be wrestled back to the harsh, violent reality of now. Present day. Where nothing’s romantic in the least. Where looking back should be the least of your worries when you’re having enough trouble keeping up with the here and now.

But that’s the reason for all this, isn’t it? Those who ignore the past are doomed to alcoholism, emphysema, and a table for one at Denny’s, right? So, not yet willing to resign myself to that dismal fate, I close my eyes, take a few deep breaths, and stare as intently as I’m able in to the past to find myself 10 years younger.

Sixteen years old is a pretty good age for a boy. I mean, sure, okay, I hadn’t actually gotten past the heavy petting stage with a member of the fairer sex yet, with the exception of a few (very brief) blowjobs, but as long as we’re being candid, the following ten years wouldn’t bring a bounty full of booty my way anyway. And as long as we’re being painfully candid, I’ve never been much good at the actual act itself, so it was at least a blissfully ignorant period. But I could drive, buy myself lunch on the meager wage I made delivering flowers after school, and spend the rest of my time lazily dreaming about the fabulously wealthy, ultra famous, sex-god I was sure to be as soon as that high-school diploma was signed and sealed.

We’re not here to lament days gone by, though. Oh, no. We’re here to figure out where we’re going. Our little trip back in time is just an unfortunate necessity. To figure out how to move forward, we have to remember where our destination was in the first place, remember?

So, besides bodily contact from the opposite sex, what did 16-year old me want? The easy answer. The simplest answer, I guess, is to do something great. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been looking for validation. For someone to say that what I’ve done is valuable, unique, or at the very least worth the effort. Which isn’t to say that I’ve been neglected that. My mother has always been a booster. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the very idea of being “great”, of doing something truly special, came from the woman herself. She never allowed my sister, or me, to accept failure for lack of trying. She’s a psychology nut, my mom. Big in to the self-love. She analyzes everyone. Tries to break them down in to chapters from her community college psychology textbook. God bless her, the woman loves a good diagnosis. Uncle Dave is autistic. The Ex is bi-polar. I’m a garden-variety manic-depressive with abandonment issues and an addictive personality.

Anyway, when we were kids, mom was riding a serious guilt trip over the divorce and thought she’d head off the emotional distress by involving my sister and me in her psychoanalytical voodoo. We sat at the foot of her bed and were encouraged to look in to a vanity mirror that spun on an axis like the chalkboards you see in movies where you can flip it over at the center. Mom, she’d have us look in to the mirror and repeat, three times, “I love myself. I love myself. I love myself.” It was only by sheer luck that we avoided being hooked from behind by Bloody Mary or the Candyman. I have to think that was the genesis of it all though. Some kids, they grow up not expecting much out of themselves because no one ever expected anything out of them in the first place. Me? Shit. On a daily basis, between waffles and hopping on the bus, Mom would say, “You can be anything you want to be.” A nice sentiment, but after too long it starts to sound more like an obligation than a suggestion. It starts to sound a lot more like, “You’d better be everything you want to be.”

And look. I know how this is all coming off. I know we’re all thinking the same thing. “Oh, boo-hoo. Your mommy loved you, encouraged you, cared for you. What a rough life you’ve had.” That’s not the point of all this. I love Mom. Who knows what kind of wreck I’d be without her guidance and support and I’m thankful every day for what she’s given me. We’re just looking for clues, all right? We’re just trying to figure out where I am. Where I was then and where I’m going.

Let’s jump back to the nearly-present for a few minutes. I’m thinking now that maybe where I was then maybe isn’t as important as where I’ve been recently. So, we covered the birth of my child. What we haven’t covered yet is THE EX! Capitalized for dramatic impact.

The Ex is like… well, metaphors elude me. Let’s put it out there, plain and simple, out on front street where it might as well just be. The Ex was a fucking band-aid. All that validation we talked about earlier? That was The Ex. That’s what I got out of the relationship, as long as we’re being honest. You take a 19 year old kid with abandonment issues and crippling self-esteem problems and give him his first apartment and his first real sex partner and you’re building a bomb, brother. If it weren’t for my uncharacteristic fear of drugs and alcohol at the time, there’s every chance I’d be reduced to giving tug-jobs in an alley for coke-money right about now. So, that was it. There I was. A 19-year old kid, living in my first apartment in the city, still quietly dealing with all that “why did Daddy leave us” bullshit and along comes a little, fake-blonde firecracker with a nice body and no hesitation for bedroom dirtiness and all of a sudden, our hero feels like, finally, someone appreciates him. Doesn’t matter that he hasn’t done shit yet. It’s easier to find someone who’ll settle for your meager accomplishments than actually work towards accomplishing something.

So, that’s how it began, I suppose. The relationship itself is a topic for a whole other story, but here’s the gist of it.

I’ve learned that losing someone from my life is a big problem for me. Not because of the loss itself, but the implications involved. Implications that, I imagine, only someone afflicted with my particular brand of abandonment-phobia would understand fully. You see, the end of a relationship isn’t a parting of two individuals who just don’t connect. It’s a direct affront to your character. It’s the harshest of all judgments. It’s a public declaration that proclaims your inadequacy. Because two people don’t separate for any other reason than that Participant B (The Ex) has found a more suitable companion than Participant A (yours truly.) The only logical explanation for the dissolution of the union is that Participant C (heretofore referred to as, Fuck-Ass) is a better lay, pulls a heftier salary, makes with funnier jokes, has a bigger dick and knows how to rock it, etc. Up here in Crazy-Town, that’s how it is. It’s barbaric, infantile, and embarrassing, but that’s it.

And the point of all that is, of course, why we’re here right now. Why I’ve spent the last 7 years with a woman I never loved, really. In that, “we’re family now” way, sure. But not real love. Not the, “I can just sit quietly with you in a car for 6 hours while we drive cross-country and hold your hand, perfectly happy,” kind of love. The reason we’re discussing any of this is to focus on how I got here. And the answer, I think we’ll all have to agree, at least for now, is fear.

What a pathetic, fucking schmuck. What a wretch. What a weak, scared, despicable fuck. Who spends years, fucking years, sleeping on a couch in the basement just to avoid the pain of abandonment? Who convinces himself that 18 years of dysfunction is preferable to one minute of isolation? Who justifies it all with the righteousness of martyrdom?

So, we’ve got the diagnosis. Mom would be proud. We’ve evaluated the symptoms and identified the affliction. All we need now is the prescription. What drug could possibly cure this ill? Let me tell ya, right now…a mirror and a catch-phrase from a community college text-book isn’t going to cover this one. Right now, a liter of rum is doing its part. A pack of Camel Lights every 24 hours fills in the gaps. That can’t last forever though. Eventually, I’ve got to figure out which direction I was headed 10 years ago and make a decision. Can I be anything I want to be? Must I be everything I’d dreamed? Or is it too late? Maybe the cure will be the end. The impressive failure. The glorious wreck. I guess time, as they say, will tell.

As for me, right now, my fingers are getting hard to control and my face is numb. My legs feel unusually warm and my whole head is tingling, feeling full and solid. I need a cigarette and a good night’s sleep.

Til next time.