Waking Up For

Yesterday I watched Fight Club for the first time.  No, there's no dramatic build up to that, and no, as much as I loved it, this post is not about Fight Club, because, well, I can't talk about it.  But while I have not yet created an alternate personality to take over my life and flood the world with mayhem, I have not been sleeping well and understand the temptation.  And in the midst of rethinking the very fabric of my existence (and, for the record, totally calling the ending) I simply wondered about the idea of coping.  "Just survive the next ______" has become the rallying cry of my every 6:00 a.m. alarm sound, and I repeatedly come to the question: "what should I get up for?"

Yesterday I watched Fight Club for the first time in the basement of a dorm building at my future school.  I had spent the afternoon exploring the campus in the windy, perfection of heaven-on-earth that is Saint Louis for exactly two days in the spring.  Yesterday was one of them.  And in between lemon sherbet sunshine and sixty-something weather, I wandered among the towering brick buildings of my immanent future lost in that inexpressible subspace of thought that keeps me awake all night and started this mess in the first place.  Trying to determine what was wrong with me that I wasn't excited when all my classmates couldn't wait to graduate; why all of this did nothing to touch the void that seemed to be widening in my chest.  Why blue skies seem infinities away when in reality the azure air is all around us.  Why every passing step grows heavier and harder, even when I'm just walking down the stairs in the morning.  Why I'm suddenly growing curious about who would miss me if I disappeared or who I would miss.

And yes, I am definitely Jack's loss of sanity.

Yesterday I watched Fight Club for the first time in the basement of a dorm building at my future school next to my best friend.  And earlier that day, while sitting alone in my car in a slowly emptying parking, desperately wishing I had someone to fall apart to, my phone rang with the some of the most beautiful words I've ever heard: "Hey, I had a crappy day. Wanna come over and watch a gritty adult movie?"  Though we ended up saving Pulp Fiction for another crappy day, it's comforting to have a back up plan.  These are the days that become my sweet escape to a college campus that in our world is only twenty minutes away, but as far as my life's concerned, might as well be another world entirely. Somewhere that isn't here where I'm writing this down in study hall.  Somewhere free from the perceptions of people who know me, those that think they do, and those who couldn't care less.  The home of the one dude who's stuck with me my whole life, and every now and then is there to catch the pieces as I messily fall apart.  Or just watch something in a darkened dorm basement and let the world worry about itself for an hour or two.

And this is what I get up for, or with the memory of.  These are the things I love and the things that motivate each next step and perhaps the one after that.  Third step's a toss up.
I am Jack's next breath.

And I'm reminded that this too shall pass.  

Baby Close Your Eyes

Behind the scrolling lines

Of professional overdub,

Someone is screaming.

The TV is muted

And only the colors catch my eye

As I stand in line

At the Delmar bubble tea,

Like the news would never touch my world

If I couldn't feel it touch me.

And somewhere between the

Coconut milk and bobas there is

Blood, blood, bomb, blood.

No what?

What?

More screaming,

But no sound.

And no words to find.

This time I’m

Watching

From the other side

Of the safety of a touch screen,

Like the digital projection was

Somehow my shield against

The reality

Of these events

That somehow I held in my palm

And pretended I could contain there.

Like maybe this was just a movie

That I could pause and rewind

Or pull up the blanket and cover my eyes

Like that

One day in eleventh grade U.S. History

Where they sat us all down in a darkened

Room to watch the bloodiest scene

In Saving Private Ryan.

And one by one we asked to use the restroom

Just to step outside the gore and breathe.

But this is real history,

Right now.

And right now my phone rings

And I answer like nothing is wrong.

Why the hell is nothing wrong?

No, no,

I’m fine.

I’m still alive.

How are you and what’s-his-name?

No, no, the cute one.

And this,

This is the fiction.

Desperate to pull it off as fact

I’ll reenact my sense of shallow

Invulnerability.

And this can’t be real life.

Because maybe it’s right to feel

That empty sense of twisted gut

And helpless horror

In the pit of my soul.

Rather than watch the big, bad world

From behind the careful crochet of a security blanket

And a voice that says

It’s far, far away.

But the wild, open eyes of a silent screamer

Caught in the bloody LCD

Of the Delmar bubble tea won’t

Stop asking me why.

And I don’t have an answer.