I'm not good at being alone. I'm good at many things, but being alone is not one of them. I can walk into a bar, a party or wedge myself between two strangers smoking a cigarette the permitted 20 feet away from city doorways and I can become old friends with strangers. I can book a train and cross the continent without fear and I can lye in a man's bed and kiss him like I have loved him countless nights before, never wondering why the scent of his skin does not smell new. I can do these things because it exists within me to be unabashed and careless and belligerently honest. I can't however, sit alone in a coffee shop or a bar or in the stillness of my living room and feel anything other than a staggering desire to be in the company of someone other than the cruel man that lingers in my mind.
I have been in California for almost two months now, a time in which I have slipped deep into my own thoughts and come face to face with my own voice in a way that I have been avoiding my entire life. It started when I began, at the age of 9 to realize I would rather kiss boys than kiss girls, a fact I was almost instinctualy ashamed of. For the better part of my adolescence I found it was easier to call myself a fagot and tell myself I was sick, that it was just a faze, and that I wouldn't be that way forever; than it was to confront myself. I remember hating myself so much that I would stand in front of my mirror and become nauseated looking at the person behind it. How could such an ugly person be in that mirror?
I think in the same way that it was easier to seek comfort in self loathing than it was to seek bravery in who I really was, I am telling myself recently that I am not an artist and I am not a writer because being both of those things is hard and requires a person to, without fear, reveal their mind even when it is ugly and even when it hurts and causes a reader to cry as I have cried. Sometimes I will sit down to write on my lap top and watch my cursor blink and erase for the duration of time it takes for my battery to die, I have done this often and in those times I am lucky to write a sentence or two. Instead of writing the truth, I think about how the truth is not worth sharing. So what is the truth?
The truth, is that I hate being alone. The truth is that I've never felt not alone, I have just been fortunate enough to, for brief periods of time, surround myself with people and romance long enough to feel just a little less alone. The truth is that I've been grappling for love in bar bathrooms, gang bangs and sex shops since I was 17. The truth is, people can smell me from a mile away and the smell of desperation is pungent and discarding. I have done things in my life that haunt me, that tug at my skull daily and beg to be forgiven, and the truth is, I'm finally brave enough to let them tug and to let them be forgiven and to quite the man in my mind who does not love me.
I think one of the reasons I hate being alone is how overwhelming my brain is. It thinks of so many things at once and it is exhausting. Other people slow my brain down in the same way half a bottle of vodka or a medical grade joint slows it. I remember sitting in a desk chair at work a few years ago, using my feet to push my body backwards and balancing the weight of myself on two legs of the chair. I pushed a little to far and began to fall. I remember the second my feet left the floor and my body lost control, it was as if time stopped. During the second or two I was falling, I remember thinking paragraphs worth of articulated thoughts, "Is my head going to hit the desk behind me? No, I'll be fine, there is room, I will just have to keep my neck tight so my head wont slam to hard against the floor. Fuck this is going to hurt so bad, where is my cell phone? In my pocket? No, it's in my hand. Don't drop your phone, you can't afford another one..." My mind raced and once I had fallen and I had stood up, I was amazed at how many thoughts my my mind just had.
I feel like I am always falling, about to hit something, and my brain is always trying to keep up with and exceed the momentum of my body. I think that is a curse most artistic minds are plagued with, and is why almost every famous artist or writers fall victim to drug abuse. My drug is and has been love. I say this again, not to beat a dead horse but because it is the truth; my mind is only calm in the arms of a lover. It is calmed by the slow gusts of air from a lovers mouth as he sleeps behind me. Letting go of that calm has been hard for me, and I have finally collapsed into myself in the absence of it. I have finally confronted myself and the truths of my decisions.
But I figure if I can get on a 3 day train ride across the America's, I can gather the strength to look in the mirror and think, "how can something so beautiful be in that mirror."
you are beautiful! ;-)
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