Where The Fuck is my Head?

I don’t have answers to any of those questions, not good ones, sure ones, or sensical ones. I just have a terrifying gnawing emptyness to make an identity out of, while sitting in this stupid empty uncertainty that is my life right now. I’ve tried thinking back to some answer I had before. I think back to my childhood and find myself unable to see a moment where I had an answer to who I was and who I might be now. But I didn’t have this feeling I have now, the emptiness where I think my identity is supposed to be. I was an incomplete child and I was ok with that. I think forward to highschool. My junior and senior years. I didn’t have an answer then either. I had the ability to pretend I was special when I was cooking dinner. The ability to say that every step I took forward was another that I would never have to take again. That I could just get through it. I had my dad to tell me that it ain’t no sin to be glad your alive. I had my writing, and could use it to pretend I was wise or smart. I made peace with not knowing who I was or what I was doing, told myself that doubt was important and moral. I hated the people at school who were loudly confident, always putting on a certainty in their path forward. I sang along to “Mystery” driving home, hating them for the million things they would die for. I can think of more than two things to die for now, but I’m helplesssly yearning for a good thing to live for, that same certain path forward. I’m ok with not knowing what I want, what my future will bring, but I’ve run out of prelaid track. I need to start laying it myself, setting out for... something. I still have no idea what.

I’m in college not caring about the things I’m learning, not knowing what I might actually care about, failing to be social and make conections that might last into my future. I don’t cook, I don’t dare walk to my dorm floor’s kitchen all the way down the hallway. I can’t bear knowing they're all closing in around me, having built them up as confident assholes who know exactly what they’re doing, while thinking that they wouldn’t understand the things I’ve been through and that they’re young and stupid. I don’t see an end to this, besides death which I am dead set on avoiding. I’m an adult now, with fifty plus years stretched infront of me to do something with. My dad is gone, unable to comfort me, and I have to mind the edges of the gaping whole he left in my family. I try to remember his precense and the comfort it gave, but that comfort came from being able to lean on him, having those solid shoulders that I could put my head or arm on. Those shoulders are buried ash now, and I realise everytime that I think of them that there is no one else I can lean on like that. There are the hugs I get at church, but no one I can trust to take from selfishly without being ready to give in return. My writing no longer convinces me of my wisdom or inteligence. Instead it’s a reminder of how stupidly self absorbed I am in my helplessness. I write out my angst over and over again, thinking it’s theraputic that I’m proccessing, getting over it, changing. I’ve changed my mind but nothing changes. Nothing I change changes anything. I just come back with the same self important angst again and again. I write creatively too, but I know that it’s going nowhere, that it’ll never be seen by other eyes, that it isn’t worth being seen, and the joy of the craft is rarely enough to drive me anymore.

It’s last year that really gets me though. My “gap year”/“service year” whatever. I was miserable then, but not like I am now. There was a sense in that life I found. It was one school year of hurting constantly from being helpless to help the kids I cared so much about. I could imagine the end date always and just keep foing knowing it would end one day. Now it has been ended for six months and I hate it. I’ve been listening to the songs that got me through the toughest days, felt the pain differently, missed it in a way. I listen to “I Miss the Misery” and don’t like how well it fits. I miss the people too, the people I bonded to in that suffering, but didn’t dare keep the conection past the year. I think about them, think about him. I want to see him again, talk to him, find out if we can have conversation when not forced together in car rides or meetings. I wonder why he could bear to stay, wonder if I would be happier if I had. I hate the organization for having so efectivelly gotten in my head and destroyed me.

I saw a car that was the same model as his today. It was driving around campus while I hid in the stillness of a winter park. I could feel myself hoping at the sight, wishing for some text saying he was in the area, asking if he could visit. It didn’t come. I was just staring at some stranger who had gotten lost. I wanted to get close enough to see the license plate to see if it matched the one I pretend I didn’t memorize. I didn’t though, lacking the energy and the courage to do so. I hate myself for the hope, I know it’s stupid, that I need to move on, talk to people here, or if I can’t do that, reach out to him myself, but I don’t dare, can’t bring myself to do it, do anything worthwhile. It's a stupid dream that I need to get over. But I only think that because last year has stripped me of hope, I think that to end my hopeless misery, I have to stop hoping for things I imagine would make me happy. It's all just another layer of miserable stupid hypocrasy. Last year I was proud of not being an idealist, proud of my cynicism. I was able to do the work without hoping for good things from it, but now that I've left the work I need that hope to be able to move on or go back. I need to have faith in my kids and there ability to survive to let the ache in my heart rest or I need to commit myself to helping them and people like them, decide that I'm here at this school that costs way too much to learn and grow so I can go back. I need to hope that I could survive years of that life, that I could lay it in front of me as a path and see something of worth beyond a way to justify my mysery to the world. That's what I'll end up doing probably, but I don't have the courage to think that yet. That person who would go back would have to be strong, strong enough to love children he knows are hurting constantly in ways he can't help, strong enough to hope for their futures, strong enough to be honest and kind to them whatever happens. Right now I don't even have the capacity to hope to be that someday. I just sit in the emptiness uselessly, fill it with sad music that seems to understand for a little while. I grasp at lyrics to explain anything. I think that I fell in love with a war and nobody told me that it ended. Or that I’m Mr. November and I haven’t already fucked us over. Or that someday somebody will come and find me and remind me who I am. Or that I just have emotional motion sickness and that I just need to stay clean and live without. Or that I’ll talk it out with him inside a car with rain falling around us. I think I'm hitting a wall and ask again and again, where the fuck is my head?