Hey you, it's been a while - the years and months slipping away from our hands, our mortality is the ultimate humbling reality of our lives. Loss is a peculiar phenomena, it seldom knocks, rather creeps up on you, through pauses in conversations, through cracks in your bravardo - people, faces, memories, convictions held firmly slip through and fade in intensity.
So tonight I can also write the saddest lines, of words said and times gone
Of promises broken and shattered dreams,
Of sleepless nights and frantic days
Days that seem to never end,
Nights that engulf me with their dark shrouds.
I can cry or play the fool,
Or be stoic and withstand it all,
I sometimes feel this is all a show,
The third act still to unfold,
Revealing the twist, untying the plot.
But what of regrets?
Of unmet needs and silent sighs?
The capitulations and retreats,
The possibilities unexplored?
I’ve buried versions of myself
with less ceremony than a houseplant.
The idealist, the romantic,
the one who thought 30 was old.
Each one died quietly,
without protest,
like they knew
they were never built to last.
Call it soul.
Call it ego.
Call it the last gasp of a man
who still believes
in the power of a well-placed
“Sure, but…”
But still
I endure.
Not gracefully.
Not quietly.
But with the stubbornness
of a weed in concrete,
a glitch in the matrix,
a man who still believes
that asking “why?”
is more sacred
than saying “amen.”
So here I am.
Thirty eight.
A little cracked,
a little cynical,
but still
unreasonably,
unapologetically,
alive.
