It's Not Safe to Swim Today

Leaving my side of town again for some new destination, some new place to call home, is as frightening as anything I’ve done in the past year. Since the last time I left home.
Again.

And again.

I can’t remember the last time I laid down roots and felt comfortable enough to call that place home since high school, or even before. And that’s the most distressing feeling I have right now. An extreme lack of sense of place and permanence and comfort and security. These are necessary things for a happy productive life. Which now seems farther and farther from my grasp. Apparently I’m not good enough anywhere.

I may not be the most industrious person in the world, Lord knows, but I did not fail to pull enough weight. I may not be the nicest person in the world, Lord knows, or the easiest to constantly get along with, but I did not fail to make friends. So now, in the wake of severe boredom and a feeling distinctly like spiraling through a void, given all this time to contemplate, I now ask myself the inevitable question of where exactly I went wrong. Of course, just as natural as the question itself is, so too is the answer naturally lent to it: and that is that there isn’t one. Lack of answers. Lack of place. Lack of permanence. I suppose it’s true that the only constant in life is change, but I’m not getting any better at dealing with the changes. There is something, that seems to me, inherently unnatural about being bounced from place to place so often. If you had told me, back when I was a teenager, or even a bright-eyed youngster, free and innocent and in place and permanent, that this is what your twenties are like, I would have told you to put me in an electric chair and fry me after my nineteenth birthday.

Because this is stupid.

That’s the only word for it. No poetry here, no sublime misdirection or flight of fancy vocab, just plain old fucking stupidity. Other people aren’t like this. What did I do to deserve it? I swear, by gods, one day I will find whoever dealt me this hand and their death shall not be swift. I will exact my vengeance slowly. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and so I shall wait. Patient and brooding, like the phantom of the proverbial opera, until the stage is set and I can give all these fuckers their what for.

Failure, it would seem, is also the new constant in my life. I cannot point to a single act I committed over the past twelve months and say with any certainty that it was, or even vaguely resembles, an accomplishment. That it was something I completed and did well. Remember back in grade school when the teacher would grade us with an S or a U? I’d even settle for satisfactory. As in, not stellar, and not above nor beyond, but merely passable, acceptable. I haven’t had that in so long.

Let’s connect the dots in this abysmal wreck I once called a Plan of Action:

Move to Indiana. Get a job. Work over the summer. Go to school. Make good grades. Successfully transition to my new house. Rinse and repeat.

Check. Check. Failed. Check. Failed. Failed. We’re 50/50 so far, and it doesn’t get much better when you throw in all the unforeseen variables. Have a nervous breakdown: check. End up homeless. Twice. Check. Wow, look at you buddy.

And now, in the midst of this smoking disasterscene, I’m being bombarded by requests and importations to flee back to the southwest, into the arms of…I don’t know. Security? Maybe. Success? Possibly. With enough work. But happiness? Fulfillment? No. Most certainly not. Maybe I’m not capable of being happy yet, maybe I haven’t learned how. But some inexorable force, some unnamed element, some divine tugging, some unexplainable cosmic power keeps me tethered to Indiana. I cannot leave her. She is my Mecca and Medina, my Plymouth Rock, my beacon, my lighthouse, my shelter from the storm that is my life. And make no mistake, these waters are not calm. They are treacherous and filled with peril. Batten down the hatches, men.

We’re in for the long haul.

P.S.

Fuck you.