prelapsarian

Losing touch

Today I watched an episode of Boy Meets World. Shawn found himself associating with a group called The Center, headed by a “Mr. Mac,” an obvious cult leader who took advantage of kids who felt “lost” and “without purpose” by making them believe what he believed.

I’ve always loathed that idea, that someone could doubt their identity to the point where they felt they didn’t know who they were or where they were going. It always seemed so over-the-top to me for someone to claim such a state of disconnect and emptiness from the world around them. Now? I get it. Not because this television show bestowed me with some kind of wisdom I hadn’t previously felt. I hadn’t even connected my current state of confusion with the episode I watched earlier this afternoon until I began to write this.

I don’t even feel that far gone. I’m not Shawn Hunter, I’m not lost and seeking someone to connect me with myself. I just feel frazzled. Tired, but hyper-aware of myself. Worried. Generally okay though.

Before I began writing this I thought I would be completely unable to tie my thoughts together in any organized fashion. I thought I’d be making vague statements with seemingly no continuity while I ruminated on whether or not this has anything to do with my recent choices to approach writing differently, to turn my back on some of it and just see where I ended up. I suppose this isn’t the stuff of prize-winning essay writing, but I expected something more chaotic to leave my mind as I began typing. I guess that’s just another level of uncertainty I wasn’t aware of.

I know who I am, but I’m not entirely sure what’s going on.

Anonymous asked: Saw Maps & Alases and thought of you. Just thought I'd let you know.

Oh yeah? Where? And how’d you like the show? 

My celebrity best friend or something

Dreams are really weird. Often I’ll wake up from one feeling emotionally affected by whatever crossed my mind while I slumbered—I remember a long time ago, I’d occasionally have a sexual dream and I woke up feeling like I had cheated on my girlfriend. Or when I was single, I’d have a similar dream about a friend and I couldn’t stop thinking about them that way. 

So it’s no surprise that when last night I had a dream that I was in some weird hotel like building, when I ran into Tina Fey and she and I made a couple of 30 Rock jokes (despite the fact that I’ve never cared for her character Liz Lemon), and when in the dream she said she’d love to get breakfast with me and my friends, that I woke up thinking “I finally get why everyone loves Tina Fey. I’d be her pal.”

Dreams are really weird. 

lol Men’s Fashion

“You expecting a flood,” the guy wearing baggy jeans and a t shirt he wrote “Modern Warfare 3: 42-0” on the back of asked me. I’ve gotten weird looks and even comments before for cuffing my jeans, but it only ever really makes me scratch my head when it happens where I live. 

“Brandon, your shorts are unmanly.”

I’m not sure what that really means, but if I had to guess, the person who said that to me probably means because I don’t wear shorts that are four sizes too big for me, six inches below my knees and hanging off my ass like every other guy (or her baby daddy, yeah I said it), I must not be a man.

I’m 5’10” and about 130 pounds. I’m fucking skinny. I wear clothes that fit my abnormally thin frame. I don’t wear t-shirts with skulls on them and yeah, my jeans are of a skinnier fit. Because I’m fucking skinny. 

I’m really not unique in the larger picture. I enjoy fashion trends more than the average male, sure. But don’t look at me funny just because I wouldn’t fit in in an Eminem music video and fuck you if you wear cargo shorts and have something to say to me, because life isn’t a god damn Dave Matthews concert, you sandal wearing fuckers. 

Gonna go shopping now. For clothes I like. 

You’re different too

I was scared when things got serious I’d feel things I’d felt before, and they’d come too quickly, with too much force that I’d fear not being able to recover if things didn’t work out. But you don’t let me worry about that because you’re you. You’re a thousand miles away from me, but you’re with me all the time and you take away my worries, make me feel at ease. Normally I’d want the world to know too, but now I don’t even care. I only need you to know and you do, and despite this contradictory fashion in which it’s not only you reading this, again, I just don’t care to worry about that. I’ll sit in bed in my jeans and wish I owned a pair of sweatpants to feel appropriately lazy when I think about being comfortable with you. I’ll smell your hair without warning, look around, think you’re there, and then realize you are. 

It’s hard to type with one hand

It’s hard to type with one hand when you have so much to say. 

I have one arm in a cast, protecting two cracked bones in my wrist, but everything that feels less than pleasant is inside my stomach and my chest, not inside my cast. 

It’s even harder to type with one hand when it doesn’t matter how many hands you have, because sorting through everything feels impossible. 

Nearly two months of focusing on five dates on a calendar was a new experience. Having those five days move by at an agreeable pace, rather than thinking they moved too quickly was even newer. 

Now what?

The real answer is things continue to move one step at a time. The real answer is things will be doable, still, and at times frustrating, again. But until there’s a new group of blocks on the calendar, it’ll feel a little upsetting. A little frustrating. A little crazy. 

My friend asked me on the way home from the airport if I learned anything, because that’s “what’s supposed to happen on a trip.” 

I learned that no matter how outlandish my daydreams may seem, they can happen. I learned the ideal person you want to be with can exist, and I learned that while perfection is a heavy word we should refrain from using, sometimes it feels wonderfully appropriate. 

So, until next time, we keep taking care of each other. A date will form, anticipation will take over, the tears rolling down our faces will dry, and I’ll come get you. 

And I’ll be waiting for you, the first thing you see, when you arrive. 

Two weeks

Can’t sit still. I need any resource available to me to keep my emotions from bursting out of my chest. I can compile a list of words whose meanings I thought I knew before, but only now can truly understand: 

• Anticipation
• Desire
• Passion

I’m going to explode. I’m picturing floodgates, buckling behind the force of more water than I ever thought existed. If it keeps on raining, the levee is going to break. Small cracks, but I’m determined to keep everything in tact just a little bit longer. 

Add excitement to that list. 

Pouring Rain

One moment the only sound you hear is the music playing overhead, shopping carts being pushed, price scanners meeting bar codes, and people talking. Then it’s all drowned out as the sky opens up and dumps torrents of rain, swallowing everything it hits in its sudden blitz. 

Then it stops, and inside your head, you see a dictionary page, you see your fingers scanning down until you reach the word intermittent. The music is still dead, the air itself is temporarily quieted, waiting for it to it to start again, and like forty-three stock cars roaring back around a mile and a half track, here comes the rain again. 

Your senses are overwhelmed. All you hear is pounding. You look down, maybe even close your eyes to let the rain be the focus of everything. It stops.

Quick, think of something profound. 

You can’t, and one more time, whatever you’re doing is met with the sound of thousands of pounds of water descending from the sky before someone breaks your concentration when they say “It sounds like it’s raining.” 

It starts and stops and starts again with such staggered, unpredictable irregularity that you don’t know how many times you’ll traverse this carousel. 

I don’t know what it’s like in other places, but here, it can be raining on one side of the street but not the other. You can drive into what looks like a science fiction movie and as you approach the rain, you can eventually see exactly where the dry road meets the soaked road, where the sound of the music playing or the engine singing will be blanketed by water pounding away before it either eases up and stops abruptly or disappears without any warning at all. 

Then the air gets heavy, the sun reappears, and all you want is for it to rain again. 

Fear?

I hate misused question marks. Stating you’re wondering something is a statement, and as such, it should end in a period. Stating you don’t know something is a statement, and as such, it should end in a period. 

But I don’t know if it’s fear or just a blurry sense of uncertainty staring me in the face right now. 

I hate that I can’t feel comfortable talking to you. I hate how critical you are. I hate how quickly you’ll blow me off and warn me about what could happen, as if I don’t know that. As if my lone past experience that didn’t end in a fairytale fashion has to linger for a period even you can’t define. I hate this sense of guilt you’ve created in me. I hate that this is my best means of venting, that in order to sort through my thoughts, that I have to organize them like this instead of just opening my mouth and letting you listen. 

So it goes.

I got my final rejection letter a couple of days ago. I didn’t tell you because I knew what you’d ask:

“So now what?”

I don’t know what. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Would you rather I push aside my doubts that have come to me with a sense of poignancy I can’t even describe, and thrust forward, letting whatever happens happen? Run the risk of coming home, sitting by the pool, and voicing my disgust and stress over the phone to a confidant loudly enough for my son, still inside the house, to hear? 

No, you don’t want that. You want me to be happy because you love me. So don’t lose sight of that. Let that be paramount. I should have done the same thing, should have just opened up and never let it fester within me, let it cripple me. 

So here’s what I know I will tell you, possibly alongside some other things, when I’ve properly readied myself to be normal again:

I don’t know what’s next and it doesn’t scare me one bit. I’m not blind because my feelings are also a thousand miles away; I’m indescribably grateful this has all hit me when it has, before I commit to something I don’t want to do. I don’t want to be a writer. It feels good to say that. A thousand miles away? A thousand miles away sits someone I’m so excited about, someone who supports everything I’ve shared with her and someone who I never should have kept from you for fear of your guarded judgment. Remember when this happened two years ago? Remember when you had the same look of skepticism on your face only to watch it all work out beautifully for your other child? I remember that. It comforts me. It doesn’t mean I’ll enjoy the same success by default, and don’t you dare think I do believe that. Give me more credit. I love you, I’m grateful for everything, EVERYTHING you do, you’ve done, you will continue to do, but understand that just like no one wants to be pregnant when they’re sixteen, few people want to be stuck, feeling dependent, when they’re twenty-three. 

I’ll talk to you soon.