I sit in your shadow, one that has loomed over me my entire life.

You make it seem as if you have found the perfect path, but I see you take shortcuts when you think no one is looking.

“Good person” the label you wear like an outfit that is too tight. Like Cinderellas sisters you insist it is yours. Every flaw of you now accentuated by the ridiculousness of your vanity.

I want to learn the real lessons you have learned, instead you teach me ones you pretend to adhere to. I want to know the world’s secrets, yet you make them up to make your journey seem grander.

Where will this lead me? Do you understand the trap you have laid?

I walk into a dark wood hoping for salvation thinking it is my path alone to walk, yet I see your footprints here. Why did you say you’ve never been?

What moves in the darkness? I hurry, hoping to be free of this weight and find only more isolation. The sounds from behind the leaves make me anxious, yet I stand up straighter for it is what I have found in my isolation.

I face the darkness head on, confident in my own safety no matter what comes. Why then, do you stumble out of the dark accusing me of attacking you? I am not capable of violence, only self defense.

We spar in the dark for what seems like hours, silence your weapon and honesty mine. Do you not trust me? With my hand I ask for assistance, and with yours you smack it away.

Your anger is with yourself, you wish to fight the man you have become and yet you strike only me. It is not too late to find yourself, to become what you wish you were, yet you act as if what I have done is unforgivable.

I love you. Is that a crime?

You make it difficult, you speak to me as if I am still a child. I take no issue with advice, but you seem to state what I am doing as if it’s what you recommend. You point out things that are obvious as if I am blind.

I can see the fear in your eyes. You do not hide the psychosis you are going through well. Age comes for you like it will all of us, and I speak to your legacy whenever I can.

Termites are in your archives, your library falls into disrepair, what then of your life stories? You seem to tell me the same five repeatedly, but what about what happened in between? Dementia is stealing away from me the only connection I have to my ancestors.

I seek family, and I find pain. I seek acceptance and honesty and I receive deception and anger. I seek love and receive “ok”

another night staring at this screen desiring to spill my soul onto the page in hopes it will make me make sense of it all.

the waterfall spills over the rock, and the water below accepts the divebombing drops like they belong. I long to dive into a city where I am accepted. Where the friends I make are ones that I feel won’t leave.

It has been 32 years, and I have no life long friends. There are people who I have connected to on various social media platforms so we can stalk each other from a distance without interacting. Friends from middleschool I would journey into the daunting city with to experience life of the adults, a trip I had won because of some competition and I brought him as my best friend. From a distance, after 17 years I see he has a wife and child. The smile on his face does not betray an inner unhappiness that I seem to have, but you can’t trust photographs. They are the con-artist of art. They were sold as the most accurate representation of real life, and now that we have ways to manipulate the imagery we no longer can trust that promise. I can trust a painting of an event more than I can trust a photo because I take it at face value. Someones interpretation, and not the facts.

I long to undo choices made long ago, ones I didn’t make but most likely influenced. I was an outcast, but it was because of the changing environment. Being the tallest kid within the several grades around me, the school yard became a bit like prison rules where if you could make fun of me then everyone would accept you. Looking back, it’s hard to place blame upon myself but I’m sure there was some slight they viewed warranted the cruelty I received. I moved around every couple years, new school, new kids, another barrier to break.

There were moments of belonging though, I would find a pocket here and there of like minded people. Sometimes I would walk into a room where that same group was delighting in the activity which sought to bring me down a peg.

I found a place finally with so many people I could disappear. I could fade into the background, and no one could hurt me. I became understated, quiet, uninteresting. I partook in no clubs, I enjoyed no fun, I went to school and I returned home.

Online I had found solace in a group of guys from a couple states away, who accepted me as part of the group. I had a purpose, I would create the environments that we would play in, and I was good at it. Every weekend I was asked to share the project I had been working on, and each week I was fueled by the question I knew was coming.

I was not allowed to be up late, my parents stood against technology and wanted me outside playing with my friends. I didn’t understand, I was playing with the only friends that would miss me if I didn’t show up.

15 years later, I sit in a room wishing I had found friends outside. Wishing, even if I hadn’t found them upon first look, I would’ve kept trying.

But maybe, connections would’ve held me back. Where would I be had I gotten grounded in the mixture of friends in the local area. I would not have moved away, pursued something. Even if I gave up, I got away.

But now I have the problem where no place feels like home. My family, the part I’m close to anyway, is a mixed family where I am only related by half blood. They live within seeing distance of each other, and the goal is to continue to grow the family area around that part of the country. I have been asked when I plan to move there, but I don’t really have a desire outside of being with them, to be apart of a family of my fathers previous marriage. My siblings from that marriage are my siblings, and maybe in 50 years it won’t matter. But ultimately the family name for that side of the family is not one I share so I feel like someone being adopted into a family I don’t care to join.

I have two families that I don’t even partake in, and when you go up a level there are two other families that don’t even know I exist. As I have gotten older, my mom’s side of the family has become less and less of a thought. It’s not to say I don’t think about them, I just have no one to champion the feeling of family I had.

I found letters from my great-grandmother to my mom. She was a widow, and my mom and grandmother were her world. The letters speak to a loneliness I feel. She just wants to be together with her family that has been scattered to the wind, and I feel the same way. At least the people she speaks of were alive at the time. The people I want to be with have all crossed over the river Styx. Will the ferryman know me from their stories, will he know where to take me to meet them?

I had an Uncle Beaver. Not his real name of course, but one he had earned at some point. He stood in as my grandfather when my real grandfather was dealing with whatever mental cloud covered him in rain perpetually. I would travel with my mom to visit my Uncle Beaver and he would take me around the Arizona RV park on his golf cart.

I remember loving that summer.

I don’t know what happened to Uncle Beaver. He just disappeared into the mystery of time, and with him the opportunity for another fun summer in Pheonix.

There’s a lot of adults who were formative to me, that I’ve never got to have an adult conversation with. I want their advice, their stories, their personality. I want to glean who I should be from who they show me they are. I want to learn to love things I hate because I can see it through their eyes. But I never will, instead I have to chase the knowledge. I have to uncover the stories that might be there, but unfortunately they didn’t write it all down.

My father tells me tales of my grandfather, the same three but maybe that’s just my dad slipping into the warm water of dementia without realizing. My grandfather was a man I never met, for he passed when my father was 15. Cancer. Was it karma for a man who farmed tobacco to die of throat cancer? Was that the comedian deity I have heard about?

This is a man I am separated from by 20 years. But why do I feel him tugging at me, like I’m destined to continue a legacy he started.

I am greater than a sum of my parts. The two family names that stand behind me, and the two lost to the ether because of tradition.

I am descendant of farmers, soldiers, adventurers, admirals, barons, and kings. I am destined to take control of my own destiny and make it great. I am meant to find the path, and if no path presents itself to forge my own by hacking my way into the dark unknown of the jungle.

Existence is a fight, it is an adventure. Humanity has conquered all, and yet we have defeated ourselves.

My life has become a full time job. 

With each passing year I become more disillusioned by the cyclical nature of capitalism. I don’t enjoy being a consumer. Well, I enjoy things. I like stuff. I engage in the accumulation of junk like I am a raccoon hoarding valuable shiny treasures in case the market turns and I find myself in a market that values the shiny junk at more than I had paid for it. 

Some of it, I fool myself into thinking it is part of my identity. That the memories the objects hold, or the ideals they represent of a better me have a power over me of which I cannot break free. 

I have moved once a year for the last several years, and every time I look at my things with a frustrated resignation to give it all up and live as a vagabond with nothing by the clothes on my back and the things tied in the sack on the stick over my shoulder. Yet a year later I find myself staring at boxes full of things I told myself I didn’t need and that I would be better off without. 

Family is a concept I struggled with. So these two people decided their love was so special it warranted yanking a consciousness from the void and subjecting them to the troubles of life in a day and age where you are obligated to pay someone money to exist. When you have a child, you are saddling them with an obligation to pay rent, insurance, taxes, and every monetary drain that has become mandatory to live a “comfortable” and/or “normal” life. 

I didn’t choose these bunch of crazy people, I didn’t ask them to be intimately involved in my affairs, to offer unsolicited advice about things I should do or how I could’ve done something different. I have come to accept that life is a “do it live” scenario where there’s no tests or trials and you have to learn to learn your lesson because life doesn’t do a after-episode wrap-up.

Alright kids, what did we learn? Death is inevitable, time keeps grinding on and you are going to owe people money until the day you die. Thats life, and there’s no better way! What? You want it to change? Don’t be silly, that’s unreasonable and you are out-of-touch for thinking there are any alternatives. 

There were several years where I wanted to change my family name. To rip it away from my identity, and exist solely as my first name. I was obsessed with carving my own path, being my own person, and removing any obligation I had to the expectations that had grown up with me. 

I have recently come around to the other side, that you don’t choose family but the universe puts you together. If you bring it all the way back to cave men, the family unit was probably the only thing you trusted to sleep near. How far we have come for familial issues to plague our modern day institution. Drama seems to grow like a fungus or attach itself inside the walls like termites, and if not actively safeguard against a family can be torn apart no because of some explosive event but because of years of neglect and a selfish mentality of being better than your neighbors.

Religion is something I will struggle with until the moment I draw my final breath, but currently I believe in something. Not a man in the sky with a big white beard who smites people with lightning, more like an energy that we can’t comprehend. I think a lot of my current belief rests on the “humans can’t comprehend” and that we have tried our best to define, explain, mystify, and destroy it. I want to believe love is something to do with it. It is my opinion that one of the greatest traits humans have is love, because it is a catalyst to a better future. I’ve tried to write out my beliefs as they currently stand in my brain several times, but each time I feel like the fail to convey the feeling I have by thinking them. It’s all a theory, and I feel like an archeologist dusting off a fossil wondering if it’s the bone of a big dinosaur or just different colored dirt. Writers often talk about struggling to write characters that are “the smartest in the room” because inevitably whatever nonsense you use to make it sound like they know what they are talking about, someone watching actually knows what they are talking about and it doesn’t make any sense. 

Ultimately I believe our consciousness is connected “behind the curtain”. That we are the universe, experiencing itself, and that the problems we experience are mostly superficial and man-made due to greed. That if we actually worked together for the good of humanity we could cure homelessness, world-hunger, find world-peace and life could truly become a long vacation before you inevitably cross over to rejoin the cosmic could of love. 

I lost my job in February. I was laid off with my entire department and about 1/3 of the company I work for, which I say in the format to reassure you it wasn’t because I was a bad employee. I had worked 10 years to achieve a place in career that I finally felt confident. Imposter syndrome, and some bad managers, had made the path through what would be a “dream-job”, a slog. 

I was excited, and happy with the results we were getting. The improvements I had seen we could make for years, I was finally in the seat to make the decisions to fix them. I had played the political game that corporations force employees to fight to get what you are worth. Under capitalism you are supposed to go out and make a living working for someone else in a job that doesn’t benefit you inherently, and in retail or sales you can see the money you are making the company to know that you are worth a certain percentage of that value. You can use those figures as part of the discussion to prove you are worth that amount. Unfortunately for me, I was in an industry that didn’t have a value tag attached. The value was whatever the CEO felt like it was worth and if you wanted more money to afford to live in the area of town the company was located, well that was ridiculous.

The pursuit of profits, and the neglect of employees is rotting our society to its core. My father retired and wishes his family would spend more time with him. Besides the fact that he lives three hours from any relatives, his family all are struggling to make ends meat let alone have enough to come visit. He is someone that fully supports the pursuits of profits, but doesn’t see the problems that mentality has put in front of him. 

Living with my dad has been tough, and honestly after the happiness and “in the right place” feeling I had with the job I lost it’s tough to be back to a place where I feel like a deadbeat. I am constantly frustrated by the way things are handled and as time goes on I realize that this is a test. If I were to believe in a divine being, who curates our experience through existence then this is the best challenge he could give to the happiness I thought I had found. The freedom I had found away from family, I now have to find with family. 

Maybe the divine deity doesn’t exist, but that framing on this situation has turned every encounter I have into one where I smile at the universe knowing it is testing my resolve and I try even harder to be at peace in whatever situation I’m in. 

So if my life is a full time job, why am I not getting paid.