My Story

[myah]

I wasn't ready sitting there under that baby oak. Ready or not, everything changed. Never knew I could be ready, though it was all I ever wanted to be.

For years I cascaded through life without rhyme or reason never knowing that all my gateways were secretly leading to this very moment.

An inconceivable liberation ...I never saw coming.

I am an addict.

My only desire was to get high and stay high. I didn't know another way. The entire Eastern Seaboard lost power that day. The Blackout of 2003, remember? August 15, 2003... night fell with a silence untouched by the common hum of streetlight electricity. That barely audible, constant buzz we never think we hear until, of course, it fails to render. Normally this would have been enough to set my unbalanced little brain ablaze...

Complete Silence.

Instead, I felt... peace. There I sat under this little tree... once and a while casing it thinking, "who planted this pretty thing in such an arrogant place?"

My usual desire was null and void. All at once I changed my mind, and truths I thought I knew had question marks sticky noted to every period.

I sat. I watched them run. My fellow addicts abandoning our 'honor among thieves' rule. Ciphering gas, and popping locks. Stealthily creating the next high just a little at a time.

I realized then, this is what we do. Us, human beings, gigantic souls crammed into tiny bodies, We Create. I surprised myself with probably the two most important questions I could ever ask myself:

" What have I created thus far? "

" Where do I go from here? "

This was instant lucidity after eons of sleep.

Across the street sat one of those places I killed my days and nights in. It sort of loomed there, like a slow moving, old brown van that I might scream at if stuck in traffic and in a hurry, which I often was. Hurry up, and stop. This is what I did. Wasting away in various metropolitan basements had become a way of life.

But, was it a waste?

Are souls thought lost by those who conform, closer to truth through self-induced scorn?

I stepped off the curb.