The Sacrifice

I don’t mean for this to be taken the wrong way, but how else am I supposed to put it?

I’ve been thinking about it ever since we decided, I mean, how could I not? I know you love me and that I never doubted, but I am sacrificing everything here and I feel alone in that. I don’t know what to say…I guess I owe it to you to be honest, this isn’t fair. I had two choices: give you up or come and get you. You knew my choice before I even made it. I get that you were stood up in the past, but I just don’t know. It just pisses me off.

You always say that you understand what I’m going through. The fact of the matter is that you don’t and you never fucking will. I’m going to give it all up for you and no matter how much I say I hate it here…this is still my home, this is where I have my friends and this is where I have my life. I think at some point you need to look at this objectively and see that I am risking everything and you are risking nothing.

We can say it all we want, but I have absolutely nothing more than your word. You know I’m a skeptic, I don’t mean to be and I want you to remember that I love you. I hate feeling this way and I wish I could change it, but the simple fact is it’s just the way I am. I’ve been screwed constantly by women my entire life, it hurts me to say but…I would be a fool if I wasn’t cautious.

You have selfish aims in this and I don’t blame you for them, not in the slightest, but you need to get it. Start to understand. I’m a kid, you have everything you need in New York…I have you and nothing else. No family, no friends, no bank, no car, no money…no nothing. I’m all on my own. You can’t save me if I drown, and I can barely tread water let alone swim. What happens if everything falls apart? What happens if I lose it? What happens if…

Never mind, I’m sure you’d be sickened to read this and think I don’t love you for writing it, but it is the way I feel. I know you worry about how long it will take me to get there, but take one fucking second and think about what is worrying me…what happens when I actually get there? Think about that the next time you think we are fighting.

We aren’t fighting, you just don’t understand.

Cut me a little fucking slack here before you make me change my mind.

5/16/09

Problems

We both know what is going to keep this from happening if you don’t nip it in the bud before it gets any worse. Don’t sit here and dance around the subject. Just say it out loud so the both of us can see it plain as day.

It’s becoming a problem isn’t it, my friend? You cannot honestly expect to move forward like this, can you? Didn’t Einstein say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result? Take a look back at the lessons you don’t seem to want to learn.

You let this fuck everything up the first time we got another chance so I stepped in and took control; I cut the ties so you could start again fresh. Think about the sacrifices I made for us when I did that. I risked it all for us. What if it didn’t work out? What if it still doesn’t work out? If that’s the case you will have to be much stronger than you are now. If not, you’re really screwed.

You can’t fuck when you’ve been drinking, you know that…don’t you? I know the answer; it is in my head as well my friend. Don’t dance around the subject. When you can’t fuck the most important person to you knows something is wrong. You can’t hide it.

Get a grip. Get control of yourself. If you piss in that cup and you aren’t clean, we both know what will happen. I’m not just talking about losing a job…I’m talking about losing it all.

So think about that from now on, will you? Remember what we did to get to this point, how far we’ve come. Don’t you dare fuck this up. I can’t promise you’ll like what happens if you do.

Consider yourself warned.

5/13/09

Zero to Sixty

He calls every now and then just to say "what's up?" It's the typical call you would expect from a close friend who moved away. For the first couple months we would talk roughly once a week, lengthy conversations that were ended long before they were truly finished. As time moved on the chats got shorter while the dead space in between our words grew longer.

It isn't something that really bothers me on a nightly basis, just every once in a while. I can't really place the blame on him, just as he cannot on me, it's just a result of the differing paths we took after leaving college in 2007. I stayed here, stagnant essentially, while he moved to Texas and jammed his foot down on the gas pedal.

So here I am, two and a half years out of school with a mediocre job, a steady girlfriend and basically all the freedom to do what I want when I want. I might have battles with my demons but all in all things aren't all that bad. For the first time in a while I feel like I'm playing my hand the way that I want to play it, not the way everyone else is telling me too. So like I said, here I am.

But then, on the other end of the spectrum, there he is.

I don't even think he has turned twenty-five yet but already he's just .5 kids short of the American Dream (if that's how you want to define it, that is). Two kids under five, a wife, two dogs, a mortgage, car payments and all the responsibility that goes along with it. I think all he's missing is the white picket fence. If you were to look back at how similar we were back in school, you would have never seen this coming. I know I sure didn't.

Originally I thought the increasingly awkward telephone silences and the dwindling number of phone calls was on account of the stress and time constraints of going zero to sixty from single stoner to married family man. Now that I put a little more thought into it, it isn't an entirely unreasonable excuse, I have no idea what it is like so I obviously can't be upset. It is what it is.

But that gets me thinking, back in the day we were inseparable. We made money, got drunk, started fights and just generally caused trouble. "Fish and Cheese," they would call us, it was never one without the other. Nowadays we couldn't be more different and it's strange to think how quickly his life changed and just how much of a rift has opened between us.

It has me contemplating my own future, where am I going and where will I end up? What will I be like? How hard will it be for my friends to relate to me? Will they even know what to say to me anymore? Will they recognize a settled down version of Cheese? Will they even be able to call me that anymore?

Speculation will get me nowhere but it's something I have never been able to keep out of my head. It's a constant nusiance, gaining speed and volume each time the calender moves forward. I see my youth fading, the jeans and T-shirt soon to be replaced by a suit and tie. The bowls and beers will give way to baby bottles and bank statements. Recklessness will fade away into responsibility. I wonder if I'll even recognize myself.

Everyone knows you can't stem the tide.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't terrify me as I watch it come in.

Back in the Saddle Again.

This was inevitable, it really was.

So after May of this year I essentially pictured myself riding off into the metaphorical sunset. I figured it would progress like a line of carefully placed dominoes tipped over by a starry eyed little kid. Boy oh fucking boy I sure sold myself on that idea when I boarded that plane to NYC back in May. I mean, who in their right mind would have thought it would be difficult to find a job in a new city during a terrible recession. Well not me obviously, because when I came crashing back down it sure did hurt.

And so…here we are again, back to square one.

It’s strange, I used to drive home after work and think of all the things I needed off my chest, things I needed to say to anyone who would listen but no one in particular. I would get home, open a beer, smoke a bowl and write aimlessly until I felt like my chest was less….uh, chesty? I wouldn’t necessarily say it felt good, but I felt something…at the very least a sense of accomplishment in the fact that I toned down my ADHD long enough to put my mind to something from start to finish.

Now it’s different.

When I first stopped, I would still have those “chesty” moments on the way home, when I felt like I was really getting at some piece of myself that I didn’t normally see, but I had nowhere to write them down. As time passed the clairvoyance disappeared to the point of nonexistence, for a while I just thought there was nothing else wrong with me, nothing else that needed sorting out. Oh how a few nights of heavy drinking corrected that very incorrect assumption. The more and more I looked at myself in the mirror, the more I realized I am an unsolvable Rubik’s Cube. I wasn’t having those “moments” because I chose not to think about them, but they were still there…just swimming beneath the surface.

Out of sight, out of mind (aka bottling shit up) never has quite been a philosophy that’s worked for me. In fact I think it may or may not have led to heavy drug use, depression, suicide attempt etc. So, along those lines I started a new blog where I attempted to deal with the things I was no longer writing here, but something was different. I would spell something out and it would float off into the air, it was off my chest but I wouldn’t think anything more about it. Out of sight out of mind right? Well not so much. I used that “clean slate” to bottle things up, it became a place to put things I didn’t want to think about anymore.

So that effort failed, but there was still that hole. Something was missing.

I, however, really have no idea what exactly that might be. Something is missing but I can’t put my finger on my pulse to determine what it is. I feel like I’m a stranger in my own skin again. So here I am, I have something to say, but what that is I haven’t the foggiest.

I’m sure we’ll get there.