He didn't know what to feel. His mind was a jumbled mess of faces and memories. Like a merry-go-round, up and down, around and around. Faces he'd known from the past. Memories clouded with doubt, fear and anxiety.
He wished he could make it all go away. I guess that's where the drugs came in good use. A distraction from the truth.
Truth. It's such an overused word. It's been used to convey realism. Reality. The moment. It's also been warped to justify something for someone. Anything to find some kind of peace. A time out from the reality of the real.
These feelings he has are strong. Instincts natural. Like breathing. But there was more to it and he would soon need to come to terms with it.
As a child, he loved spending time with his great-grandmother. The lilt of her voice. The fullness of her smile. The warmth of her hug. It was his security blanket. It was what made him safe.
He never forgot the last time he saw her, before her passing. Funny, he couldn't even remember if he had attended the funeral. Strange he thought.
He had returned from a trip overseas. Six months spent traveling in a bus only to take up roots in a small foreign town with a penchant for theatre. He would only be in the States for two weeks. After which he would return to Europe and begin a new chapter in this dream of a life. He went to visit her, surprise her. No one knew he was coming back to the states. He wanted to shock them all, only, when he went to visit her, it was she who shocked him.
"You don't look well, what's wrong?", she said. "Nothing," he told her. "You sure, you look different."
This had been extremely unsettling for him. "How did she know," he thought.
He came from a family that had very strong instincts. The unknown was something that was attainable to certain members of his family. It was difficult to fully mask his feelings so he tried to play it off as best as possible.
"I'm just tired from all the traveling Mom, that's all." She let it go but he knew she knew there was something wrong.
As a child, he often knelt by his bedroom window. Sometimes late at night when everyone in the house was asleep. The summertimes were his favorite. A light breeze coming through the dusty screened window. He was attracted to the sounds of the night. There was a purity in it that was a stark contrast to the sounds of the day. "Daytime, he thought, is so busy. Not like the night. Still and fragrant." The distant sounds of the highway. He would imagine where those cars were going. The people in them. Were they happy? Sad? Were they coming from some party or moving away? Question upon question, with a fantasy that followed.
As he became older he noticed his thoughts directed more towards the people out at night. Why were they up so late? Couldn't they sleep too? Maybe they were coming from a movie? Dinner with friends?
"Silly," he said.
His teenage years were rough. He always felt different. Out of place. He once asked his father if he was adopted. His father told him to stop being foolish. He just lowered his head as if there was something to be ashamed about. Is it really that bad of a question? He didn't fit in with anyone in his family. He didn't like sports, so the basketball games played between his father, brother, uncle and cousins were always a source of discomfort. "You've got to hustle more," he would hear. Move that "tub-a-lard", "butterball." Who needed enemies, he had a family, was all he could think.
In time he developed ways around the embarrassment. Comic Books. With them, he found a world that was tolerant of different people, and if they weren't, there was someone or a group of people, willing to fight for what was right.
A world where, in the end, the bad guys were defeated or at least in the third issue.
Hanging around the older women was comforting. They took pity on him. They could see that he was more "sensitive" than the other boys, more delicate. But not fragile. They knew that he saw things differently.
There are two moments in his life that he can never forget. One his graduation from high school and his graduation from college. Four years apart and almost identical in events.
High School graduation was June of 1983. It was a very hot summer. For whatever reason he got into an argument with his father over his dress attire for the ceremony. He wanted to wear just a dress shirt, slacks and tie. But for some unknown reason, his father wanted him to wear a suit. Full on three piece suit in the beginning of summer. He always wondered if God would hate him for cursing his father.
He argued his point but father wouldn't allow it. It wasn't until they were at the graduation and he was lined up with his classmates that his father realized something. Very few students were wearing suits. His father tried to help by offering to hold his suit jacket. He declined. "Might as well make him suffer as well," he thought.
That was the intuition he inherited from his mother's side of the family. As the ceremony music began to play he suddenly realized that this was it. He would leave this hellhole of a life behind and start new. It wouldn't be until years later that he saw this as a pattern. His method of operation for exorcising demons and moving on to bigger and better things. Always running from the truth.
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