So Lieutenant Carver and his former partner drink cans of beer in the police station parking lot. It’s the final season of The Wire, so we’ve seen the officers make mistakes. A recent one ruined a young boy’s life—his foster mom gets third degree burns after a Molotov cocktail attack, and he ends up getting brutalized in a group home. That knowledge haunts Carver. He was a bit of a knucklehead in his early days, but he’s since grown to be a competent cop and a good man who really tried to help that poor kid. “We thought none of it mattered,” Carver says, “but it did.”

He crumples up this cheap beer can. He can’t let go of all the fuckups he must have made when he was young and stupid, and he can’t let go of the fuckup with the kid, and he can’t shake off the fuckups he has yet to make even when he tries to do right, so he just crumples up this can and hurls it onto the station’s roof, where there’s already a pile of a thousand other empties other cops have thrown.

I try to write the beer can.

I think I’ll have the blackened salmon.

I was given the gift of empathy

I feel that which you feel

I feel it with you

And it sometimes breaks me

I know your sadness

As if it were my own

Because I’ve experienced it before

The bleak depths of its darkness

I know your happiness too

Because there can be no darkness

Without light

But the happy times are far too few

A phrase often heard in the world we live in. I have chosen to make an addendum to this phrase. Money doesn’t buy happiness, if it belongs to you. I make this claim having seen what my money has done for others. Seeing a family cry with relief at having their medical bills anonymously paid for, or seeing a student jump with joy when they find out someone sent them a check for their tuition. Moments like these show that you can‘t buy yourself happiness, but you can use it to contribute to someone else’s.

(Drift-er // a person who is continually moving from place to place, without any fixed home.)

She's tired. Tired of being strong. Tired of faking a smile. Tired of being "okay." At the end of every day, she dreams of a new place, a new life, and unpredictably predictable takes off in search of it. Everyone knows her, yet no one knows her; it's what to expect when you have the highest following and all the money in the world. Everyone thinks it's her "next adventure," but in reality, she's just a drifter with no true home. In her mind, if you don't let yourself get too close to someone, it won't hurt as bad when they leave you.

Yes, she's a drifter, but it's only the moment she lies her head on her pillow where she feels the safest not to be okay. She cries until she feels no more. Staying up half the night, she thinks of the impossible and dreams of what could have been... what would never happen in her lonely life. She could paint with all the tears that had come out of each eye. Drop by drop, little by little; the tears keep coming. She tells herself, "Turn it off," turn off the emotions, the feeling, the pain... to only drift away.

She drifts away into a beautiful world; dream after dream plays in her head. That's where she loves to spend her time, in those dreams. It's where she escapes, where there seem to be no worries or problems or heartache. The dreams are almost tangible to her, like she's a part of them. Like she can reach out and feel... well, anything really. She feels the grass under her feet. She feels rain and the happiness of laughter from dancing in it. She feels her late father wrap his arms around her into a loving squeeze. She feels home.

Then a loud noise interrupts the dream. It's a dreadful sound that gently brings her back to the real world. It's morning. The sun is shining through her window. She can feel the warmth of the curtain-stained beam landing on her bare shoulder. She can hear the wind sway the trees as the fall season approaches. She rolls to her back and opens her eyes to see her white ceiling. She tells herself, "You're going to be okay. It'll be a good day."